TAPIR Seminar

Small-Scale implications of alternative dark matter models

Victor Robles, Postdoctoral Scholar, Dept of Astrophysics, UC Irvine,

Over the past four decades, cosmologists have assumed that dark matter is made of cold (non-relativistic) and non-interacting hypothetical particles with typical mass m~100GeV leading to the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm. Although this hypothesis describes the large-scale distribution of galaxies in the universe, there are long-standing discrepancies at small-scales that suggest we do not have the complete picture, e.g. cusp-core and too-big-to-fail problems. To have the complete picture, we need numerical simulations exploring the synergy between baryonic matter and new dark matter physics beyond CDM. I will discuss the implications of my recent cosmological simulations with self-interacting dark matter and quantum (fuzzy) dark matter on small-scale challenges, addressing how these simulations offer a new path to probe the fundamental nature of dark matter.

Event Sponsors:

Theoretical AstroPhysics Including Relativity and Cosmology (TAPIR) - More events from this Sponsor

For more information, please contact JoAnn Boyd by phone at 4280 or by email at [email protected].