Implications of Milky Way Substructures for the Nature of Dark Matter

Abstract

We study how the indirect observation of dark matter substructures in the Milky Way, using recent stellar stream studies, translates into constraints for different dark matter models. Particularly, we use the measured number of dark subhalos in the mass range $10^7-10^9{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$ to constrain modifications of the subhalo mass function compared to the cold dark matter scenario. We obtain the lower bounds $m_{\mathrm{WDM}}>3.2\mathrm{keV}$ and $m_{\mathrm{FDM}}>5.2\times 10^{-21}\mathrm{eV}$ on the warm dark matter and fuzzy dark matter particle mass, respectively. When dark matter is coupled to a dark radiation bath, we find that kinetic decoupling must take place at temperatures higher than $T_{\mathrm{kd}}>0.7\mathrm{keV}$. We also discuss future prospects of stellar stream observations.

Comments: minor errors corrected, accepted for publication in PRD