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A forward-modelling method to infer the dark matter particle mass from strong gravitational lenses

He, Qiuhan; Robertson, Andrew; Nightingale, James; Cole, Shaun; Frenk, Carlos S.; Massey, Richard; Amvrosiadis, Aristeidis; Li, Ran; Cao, Xiaoyue; Etherington, Amy

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Authors

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Dr Qiuhan He qiuhan.he@durham.ac.uk
Post Doctoral Research Associate

Ran Li

Xiaoyue Cao



Abstract

A fundamental prediction of the cold dark matter (CDM) model of structure formation is the existence of a vast population of dark matter haloes extending to subsolar masses. By contrast, other dark matter models, such as a warm thermal relic (WDM), predict a cutoff in the mass function at a mass which, for popular models, lies approximately between 107 and 1010M⊙⁠. We use mock observations to demonstrate the viability of a forward modelling approach to extract information about low-mass dark haloes lying along the line of sight to galaxy–galaxy strong lenses. This can be used to constrain the mass of a thermal relic dark matter particle, mDM. With 50 strong lenses at Hubble Space Telescope resolution and a maximum pixel signal-to-noise ratio of ∼50, the expected median 2σ constraint for a CDM-like model (with a halo mass cutoff at 107M⊙⁠) is mDM>4.10keV (50 per cent chance of constraining mDM to be better than 4.10 keV). If, however, the dark matter is a warm particle of mDM=2.2keV⁠, our ‘approximate Bayesian computation’ method would result in a median estimate of mDM between 1.43 and 3.21 keV. Our method can be extended to the large samples of strong lenses that will be observed by future telescopes and could potentially rule out the standard CDM model of cosmogony. To aid future survey design, we quantify how these constraints will depend on data quality (spatial resolution and integration time) as well as on the lensing geometry (source and lens redshifts).

Citation

He, Q., Robertson, A., Nightingale, J., Cole, S., Frenk, C. S., Massey, R., …Etherington, A. (2022). A forward-modelling method to infer the dark matter particle mass from strong gravitational lenses. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 511(2), 3046-3062. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac191

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 16, 2022
Online Publication Date Jan 28, 2022
Publication Date 2022-04
Deposit Date Sep 29, 2021
Publicly Available Date May 23, 2022
Journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN 0035-8711
Electronic ISSN 1365-2966
Publisher Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 511
Issue 2
Pages 3046-3062
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac191
Related Public URLs https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv201013221H

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Copyright Statement
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. ©: 2022 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.





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