2010/04/30 by Aurel Schneider, Lawrence M. Krauss, Ben Moore
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Dark matter halo #Galactic halo #Galaxy #Halo #Massive particle #Physics #Scalar field dark matter #Solar System #WIMP #Weakly interacting massive particles #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.82.063525
published as Phys.Rev.D82:063525,2010 · 6 pages, revision in response to referees report. Now accepted by Phys. Rev D., in press
arxiv created 2010/08/13 · openalex publication_date 2010/09/21 · arxiv updated 2014/11/20 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Detecting dark matter as it streams through detectors on Earth relies on knowledge of its phase space density on a scale comparable to the size of our Solar System. Numerical simulations predict that our galactic halo contains an enormous hierarchy of substructures, streams and caustics, the remnants of the merging hierarchy that began with tiny Earth-mass microhalos. If these bound or coherent structures persist until the present time, they could dramatically alter signatures for the detection of weakly interacting elementary particle dark matter. Using numerical simulations that follow the coarse grained tidal disruption within the Galactic potential and fine grained heating from stellar encounters, we find that microhalos, streams, and caustics have a negligible likelihood of impacting direct detection signatures implying that dark matter constraints derived using simple smooth halo models are relatively robust. We also find that many dense central cusps survive, yielding a small enhancement in the signal for indirect detection experiments.