2025/12/17 by Romanello, Massimiliano, Despali, Giulia, Marulli, Federico +2
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.15883
Warm and self-interactive dark matter cosmologies have been proposed as non-baryonic solutions to the tensions between the Λ Cold Dark Matter model and observations at the kpc scale. In this paper, we use the dark matter-only runs of the aida-tng project, a set of cosmological simulations of different sizes and resolutions, to analyze the macroscopic impact of alternative dark matter models on the abundance, the radial distribution and the clustering properties of halos. We adopt the halo occupation distribution formalism to characterize the evolution of its parameters M1 and α with the mass and redshift selection of our sample. By dividing the halo population into central and satellites, we are able to study their spatial density profile, finding that a Navarro-Frenk-White model is not accurate enough to describe the radial distribution of subhalos, and that a generalized Navarro-Frenk-White model is required instead. Warm dark matter models, in particular, present a cuspier distribution of satellites, whereas self-interacting dark matter exhibits a shallower density profile. Moreover, we find that the small-scale clustering of dark matter halos provides a powerful tool to discriminate between alternative dark matter scenarios, in preparation for a more detailed study that fully incorporates baryonic effects, and for a comparison with observational data from galaxy clustering.