Speaker
Description
One of the most striking predictions from the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm postulates the existence of myriads of planet-sized subhaloes devoid of stars (i.e. `dark'). A large population of these objects will generate a stochastic gravitational field that can in principle perturb the trajectories of visible systems.
In this talk I will present a statistical technique for deriving the spectrum of random fluctuations directly from the number density of substructures with known mass and size functions.
I will show that in galaxies like the Milky Way the fluctuations of the tidal field are completely dominated by the smallest and most abundant subhaloes.
In light of this result I will discuss observational experiments that may be sufficiently sensitive to Galactic tidal fluctuations to probe the ``dark'' low-end of the subhalo mass function and constrain the particle mass of warm and ultra-light axion dark matter models.
