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New Constraints on Warm Dark Matter from the Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest Power Spectrum

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arxiv 2209.14220 v2 pith:2A6WNSIN submitted 2022-09-28 astro-ph.CO astro-ph.GA

classification astro-ph.COastro-ph.GA
keywords forestalphadarklyman-matterscalesspectrumsuppression
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

The forest of Lyman-$\alpha$ absorption lines detected in the spectra of distant quasars encodes information on the nature and properties of dark matter and the thermodynamics of diffuse baryonic material. Its main observable -- the 1D flux power spectrum (FPS) -- should exhibit a suppression on small scales and an enhancement on large scales in warm dark matter (WDM) cosmologies compared to standard $\Lambda$CDM. Here, we present an unprecedented suite of 1080 high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulations run with the Graphics Processing Unit-accelerated code Cholla to study the evolution of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest under a wide range of physically-motivated gas thermal histories along with different free-streaming lengths of WDM thermal relics in the early Universe. A statistical comparison of synthetic data with the forest FPS measured down to the smallest velocity scales ever probed at redshifts $4.0\lesssim z\lesssim 5.2$ (Boera et al. 2019) yields a lower limit $m_{\rm WDM}>3.1$ keV (95 percent CL) for the WDM particle mass and constrains the amplitude and spectrum of the photoheating and photoionizing background produced by star-forming galaxies and active galactic nuclei at these redshifts. Interestingly, our Bayesian inference analysis appears to weakly favor WDM models with a peak likelihood value at the thermal relic mass of $m_{\rm WDM}=4.5$ keV. We find that the suppression of the FPS from free-streaming saturates at $k\gtrsim 0.1\,\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{km}^{-1}$ because of peculiar velocity smearing, and this saturated suppression combined with a slightly lower gas temperature provides a moderately better fit to the observed small-scale FPS for WDM cosmologies.

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Cited by 11 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Modeling the Cosmological Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest at the Field Level

    astro-ph.CO 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    An effective-field-theory forward model reproduces the Lyman-alpha forest field from a hydrodynamic simulation at percent level, down to a few megaparsecs, using the same initial conditions.

  2. Dark Photons from Perturbative Decay of a Misaligned Higgs Field

    hep-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Stochastically misaligned dark Higgs decay into dark photons can make all the dark matter for m_A′ ≈ 100 eV–1 GeV and g ≈ 10^-15–10^-10, shrinking to 10 keV–1 MeV with one-loop kinetic mixing.

  3. Ringing of the Reionization: A first direct measurement of the intergalactic pressure smoothing scale at redshift z>4.2 as imprinted onto small-scale peculiar velocities in the Lyman-alpha forest

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    A claimed first direct measurement of the IGM pressure smoothing scale at z≈4.2–5.0 from a fitted peak in the Lyman-alpha flux power spectrum, tied to an acoustic feature in the peculiar velocity gradient.

  4. Bridging Simulations and EFT: A Hybrid Model of the Lyman-Alpha Forest Field

    astro-ph.CO 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A hybrid EFT forward model using N-body displacements reproduces the simulated Lyman-alpha forest to 5% at k <= 1 h/Mpc with a white-noise residual.

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    Relativistic accretion onto Kerr primordial black holes gives roughly 4.5x mass growth and fast spin-down, strengthening BBN bounds, lowering the survival mass to ~2.7e14 g, and erasing the high-frequency stochastic g...

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    astro-ph.CO 2025-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Adding extended lensed arcs to quasar flux ratios in 28 JWST lenses tightens the dark-matter free-streaming limit to m_hm < 10^7.4 M⊙ (galacticus prior) and gives the most precise lensing measurement of subhalo abundance.

  7. The Compressed 3D Lyman-Alpha Forest Bispectrum

    astro-ph.CO 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    The Lyman-alpha forest bispectrum can be compressed into 26 skew spectra, including a new shifted variant, with tree-level EFT predictions matching simulations at 1-2 sigma up to k≈0.17 h/Mpc.

  8. Small-scale Lyman alpha forest cosmology with PRIYA: Constraints from XQ100 and KODIAQ-SQUAD one-dimensional flux power spectra

    astro-ph.CO 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    The XQ100 Lyman-alpha forest power spectrum, modeled with the PRIYA simulations, gives cosmological constraints consistent with eBOSS and Planck and constrains the IGM thermal history without external temperature data...

  9. Interpreting the Hubble tension with a cascade decaying dark matter sector

    astro-ph.CO 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A cascade decaying dark matter model combining early and late effects still cannot reduce the Hubble tension below about 3 sigma, and is statistically disfavored relative to Lambda CDM.

  10. 3D matter power spectrum correspondence to 1D Lyman-alpha flux power spectrum

    astro-ph.CO 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A phenomenological recipe maps 3D matter power to 1D Lyman-alpha flux power, adds warm dark matter and pressure cutoffs in quadrature, and matches simulations to within 5-20%.

  11. Universal lower bound on the axion decay constant from free streaming effects

    astro-ph.CO 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Abundance-boosted axion dark matter generically produces warm nonzero-momentum modes, so Lyman-alpha free-streaming and isocurvature bounds exclude fa below about 10^14-10^15 GeV (10^-18 eV/ma) for most ultralight axi...

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