The Equilibrium Structure of CDM Halos

Abstract

Dark-matter halos are the scaffolding around which galaxies and clusters are built. They form when the gravitational instability of primordial density fluctuations causes regions which are denser than average to slow their cosmic expansion, recollapse, and virialize. Understanding the equilibrium structure of these halos is thus a prerequisite for understanding galaxy and cluster formation. Numerical N-body simulations of structure formation from Gaussian-random-noise initial conditions in the CDM universe find a universal internal structure for halos. Objects as different in size and mass as dwarf spheroidal galaxies and galaxy clusters are predicted to have halos with the same basic structure when properly rescaled, independent of halo mass, of the shape of the power spectrum of primordial density fluctuations, and of the cosmological background parameters. This remarkable universality is a fundamental prediction of the CDM model, but our knowledge is limited to the ``empirical'' N-body simulation results, with little analytical understanding. We summarize here our attempts to fill this gap, in an effort to derive and give physical insight to the numerical results and extend them beyond the range of numerical simulation: (1) Simulated halos which form from highly simplified initial conditions involving gravitational instability in a cosmological pancake show that many of the universal properties of CDM halos are generic to cosmological gravitational collapse and do not require Gaussian-random-noise density fluctuations or hierarchical clustering. (2) A fluid approximation derived from the Boltzmann equation yields an analytical theory of halo dynamics which can explain many of the N-body results ... (abridged)