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arXiv · 2201.06551

Dark matter self-interactions in the matter power spectrum

Abstract

We study the imprints of secluded dark sectors with a mass gap and self-interactions on the matter power spectrum. When Dark Matter (DM) is sufficiently light, in the ballpark of a few KeV, and self-interacting we find qualitative difference with respect to $\Lambda$CDM and also to free streaming DM. In order to emphasize the role of interactions for the evolution of the primordial perturbations we discuss various regimes: ranging from the ideal case of a tightly coupled perfect fluid to the free case of Warm Dark Matter, including the realistic case of small but non-vanishing self-interactions. We compute the matter power spectrum in all these regimes with the aid of Boltzmann solvers. Light dark sectors with self-interactions are efficiently constrained by Lyman-$\alpha$ data and we find that the presence of self-interactions relaxes the bound on the DM mass. As a concrete realization we study models with dark QCD-like sectors, where DM is made of light dark-pions.

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Raghuveer Garani, Michele Redi, Andrea Tesi. 2022-01-17. Dark matter self-interactions in the matter power spectrum. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2022/07/012

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