Constraints on nature of ultra light dark matter particles with 21cm forest

Abstract

The ultra-light scalar fields can arise ubiquitously, for instance, as a result of the spontaneous breaking of an approximate symmetry such as the axion and more generally the axion-like particles. In addition to the particle physics motivations, these particles can also play a major role in cosmology by contributing to dark matter abundance and affecting the structure formation at sub-Mpc scales. In this paper, we propose to use the 21cm forest observations to probe the nature of ultra-light dark matter. The 21cm forest can probe much smaller scales than the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest, that is, $k\gtrsim 10{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-1}$. We explore the range of the ultra-light dark matter mass $m_u$ and $f_u$, the fraction of ultra-light dark matter with respect to the total matter, which can be probed by the 21cm forest. We find that 21cm forest can potentially put the dark matter mass lower bound $m_u\gtrsim 10^{-18}$ eV for $f_u=1$, which is 3 orders of magnitude bigger mass scale than those probed by the current Lyman-$\alpha$ forest observations.While the effects of the ultra-light particles on the structure formation become smaller when the dominant component of dark matter is composed of the conventional cold dark matter, we find that the 21cm forest is still powerful enough to probe the sub-component ultra-light dark matter mass up to the order of $10^{-19}$ eV. The Fisher matrix analysis shows that $(m_u,f_u)\sim (10^{-20}\mathrm{eV},0.3)$ is the most optimal parameter set which the 21cm forest can probe with the minimal errors for a sub-component ultra-light dark matter scenario.

13 pages, 9 figures. Published in PRD

References in corpus (9)

• Ultralight scalars as cosmological dark matter
• Cosmology at Low Frequencies: The 21 cm Transition and the High-Redshift Universe
• Suppression of H_2 Cooling in the Ultraviolet Background
• Axion as a Cold Dark Matter candidate
• Constraining the radio-loud fraction of quasars at z>5.5
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• The 21 Centimeter Forest
• The earliest galaxies seen in 21 cm line absorption
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Cited by in corpus (18)

• The discovery of a highly accreting, radio-loud quasar at z=6.82
• The 21-cm forest as a simultaneous probe of dark matter and cosmic heating history
• 21 cm Forest Constraints on Primordial Black Holes
• Boosting small-scale structure via primordial black holes and implications for sub-GeV dark matter annihilation
• 21cm forest probes on the axion dark matter in the post-inflationary Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking scenarios
• Probing Oscillons of Ultra-Light Axion-like Particle by 21cm Forest
• Using the redshift evolution of the Lyman-$\alpha$ effective opacity as a probe of dark matter models
• Anisotropies in Cosmological 21 cm Background by Oscillons/I-balls of Ultra-light Axion-like Particle
• Deep learning-driven likelihood-free parameter inference for 21-cm forest observations
• Prospects for Observing High-redshift Radio-loud Quasars in the SKA Era: Paving the Way for 21-cm Forest Observations
• Probing Ultra-light Axion Dark Matter from 21cm Tomography using Convolutional Neural Networks
• Analyzing the 21cm forest with Wavelet Scattering Transform: Insight into non-Gaussian features of the 21cm forest
• Impact of dark matter-baryon relative velocity on the 21cm forest
• Boosting the 21 cm forest signals by the clumpy substructures
• Survival of Gas in Subhalos and Its Impact on the 21 cm Forest Signals: Insights from Hydrodynamic Simulations
• Analytical modeling of the one-dimensional power spectrum of 21-cm forest based on a halo model method
• Efficient neutral-IGM inference from noisy 21-cm forest spectra with latent-space U-Net encoding and XGBoost
• Probing power spectrum enhancement at small scales with the SKA