Strong bound on canonical ultra-light axion dark matter from the Lyman-alpha forest

2020/07/31 by Keir K. Rogers, Hiranya V. Peiris · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.126.071302

published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 071302 (2021) · 8 pages, 4 figures. Minor changes to match version accepted for publication in PRL

arxiv created 2020/12/24 · arxiv updated 2021/02/23

Abstract

We present a new bound on the ultra-light axion (ULA) dark matter mass m_a, using the Lyman-alpha forest to look for suppressed cosmic structure growth: a 95% lower limit m_a > 2 × 10^-20 eV. This strongly disfavors (> 99.7% credibility) the canonical ULA with 10^-22 eV < m_a < 10^-21 eV, motivated by the string axiverse and solutions to possible tensions in the cold dark matter model. We strengthen previous equivalent bounds by about an order of magnitude. We demonstrate the robustness of our results using an optimized emulator of improved hydrodynamical simulations.

Cited by

• General framework for cosmological dark matter bounds using N-body simulations
• Lyman-α forest constraints on pure and mixed fuzzy dark matter
• A Reusable Hierarchical Framework for Joint Inference of Ultralight-Dark-Matter Mass and Core-Halo Scaling