2024/12/18 by Andrew J. Long, Long, Andrew J., Moira Venegas +1 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Scientific Research and Discoveries
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2412.14322
openalex publication_date 2024/12/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In models of warm dark matter, there is an appreciable population of high momentum particles in the early universe, which free stream out of primordial over/under densities, thereby prohibiting the growth of structure on small length scales. The distance that a dark matter particle travels without obstruction, known as the free streaming length, depends on the particle's mass and momentum, but also on the cosmological expansion rate. In this way, measurements of the linear matter power spectrum serve to probe warm dark matter as well as the cosmological expansion history. In this work, we focus on ultra-light wave wave dark matter (WWDM) characterized by a typical comoving momentum q_∗ and mass m. We first derive constraints on the WWDM parameter space (q_∗, m) using Lyman-α forest observations due to a combination of the free-streaming effect and the white-noise effect. We next assess how the free streaming of WWDM is affected by three modified expansion histories: early matter domination, early dark energy, and very early dark energy.