Skip to content

What mass are the smallest protohalos?

Stefano Profumo, Kris Sigurdson, Marc Kamionkowski

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/0603373

Abstract

We calculate the kinetic-decoupling temperature for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in supersymmetric (SUSY) and universal-extra-dimension (UED) models that can account for the cold-dark-matter abundance determined from cosmic microwave background measurements. Depending on the parameters of the particle-physics model, a wide variety of decoupling temperatures is possible, ranging from several MeV to a few GeV. These decoupling temperatures imply a range of masses for the smallest protohalos much larger than previously thought -- ranging from 10-6 earth masses to 102 earth masses. We expect the range of protohalos masses derived here to be characteristic of most particle-physics models that can thermally accommodate the required relic abundance of WIMP dark matter, even beyond SUSY and UED.

Create a lesson