Are halos of collisionless cold dark matter collisionless?
We study whether gravitational scattering of halo dark matter particles by subhalos can connect two seemingly independent problems: the abundance of subhalos in dark matter halos and the cuspiness of the halos' inner density profiles. Our numerical experiments indicate that subhalos can cause the collisionless dark matter particles in the centers of main halos to diffuse. Combined with tidal mass loss of the subhalos, this process introduces significant scatter in the inner density profiles and offers an explanation for the range of profiles seen in both observations and cosmological simulations.
Departments of Astronomy and Physics, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Chung-Pei
CP
Ma
Michael
M
Boylan-Kolchin