Fully relativistic treatment of decaying cold dark matter in $N$-body simulations

Abstract

We present $N$-body simulations in which either all, or a fraction of, the cold dark matter decays non-relativistically to a relativistic, non-interacting dark radiation component. All effects from radiation and general relativity are self-consistently included at the level of linear perturbation theory, and our simulation results therefore match those from linear Einstein-Boltzmann codes such as CLASS in the appropriate large-scale limit. We also find that standard, Newtonian $N$-body simulations adequately describe the non-linear evolution at smaller scales ($k\gtrsim 0.1h/\mathrm{Mpc}$) in this type of model, provided that the mass of the decaying component is modified correctly, and that the background evolution is correctly treated. That is, for studies of small scales, effects from general relativity and radiation can be safely neglected.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Large-scale dark matter simulations
• Euclid preparation: IX. EuclidEmulator2 -- Power spectrum emulation with massive neutrinos and self-consistent dark energy perturbations
• Constraints on dark matter to dark radiation conversion in the late universe with DES-Y1 and external data
• Do you smell something decaying? Updated linear constraints on decaying dark matter scenarios
• The cosmological simulation code $\mathrm{CO}N\mathrm{CEPT}1.0$
• Simulations of Gravitational Heating Due to Early Matter Domination
• A Novel Scheme for Dark Matter Annihilation Feedback in Cosmological Simulations
• Decaying Dark Matter: Simulations and Weak-Lensing Forecast