Sunday 20 December 2015

ETHOS I

We have taken the first major step towards developing ETHOS! As I described in a previous post, we have assembled a team of theoretical physicists, cosmologists, astroparticle physicists and astrophysicists to generalize the current theory of structure formation to include additional (and allowed) non-gravitational dark matter interactions (we call this theory ETHOS).

In a first paper that we just submitted, we have taken a significant goal towards developing ETHOS by developing a mapping between the mycrophysical model of dark matter to the effective parameters that are relevant for cosmological structure formation. In this first study we have worked out how the dark matter density fluctuations grow in time during what is called the linear regime (i.e. when the fluctuations are relatively small compared to the mean).