Speaker
Description
Structure formation at small cosmological scales provides an important frontier for Dark Matter (DM) research.
So far, many non-cold DM (nCDM) candidates have been proposed in order to give a better description of the structure formation and distribution at small scales, with respect to the standard cold DM (CDM) model.
The details of the small-scale power suppression depend on the DM particle nature, allowing for a direct link between DM models and astrophysical observations. However, most of the constraints currently available refer to a very specific shape of the power suppression, corresponding to thermal warm DM. Nonetheless, most of the viable particle DM candidates are not characterised by a thermal momentum distribution.
In this talk, I will discuss an efficient method for constraining both thermal and non-thermal DM scenarios with the Lyman-alpha forest, based on a simple and flexible parametrisation capable to reproduce the small-scale clustering signal of a large set of nCDM models.
I will present the first astrophysical constraints on such parametrisation, easily translatable to bounds on the fundamental nCDM properties without the need to run any specific numerical simulations.
