The Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability in an Expanding Universe and its Effect on Dark Matter

Abstract

We extend the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability to an expanding background. We study the evolution of a non-viscous irrotational fluid and find that for wavelengths much smaller than the Hubble scale small perturbations of the fluid are unstable for wavenumbers larger than a critical value. We then apply this result in the early universe, treating cold dark matter as a classical fluid with vanishing background pressure.

Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure. v2 extended to cover density perturbations and now applies to both compressible and incompressible irrotational fluids. Clarified discussion. v3 typos corrected, extended discussion