Dr. Manoj Kaplinghat, at the University of California, Irvine, will undertake a collaborative project, with Dr. Joel Primack at the University of California, Santa Cruz (0607712) and Dr. Anatoly Klypin at New Mexico State University (0607752), to use high-resolution N-body simulations to compare density profiles of dark matter halo and satellite abundance counts for the two best-motivated classes of dark matter from super-symmetry: Cold Dark Matter (CDM) and non-thermal Warm Dark Matter (ntWDM). Models predict that these two classes have identical large-scale structure but begin to differ on scales of million-par-second (~10E22 meter) or smaller. The team will make predictions for the density profiles of thermal and non-thermal WDM halos and determine the size and importance of the phase-space limited cores that must exist in these WDM halos. They will study structure formation at high redshifts and investigate the prospects for early reionization in WDM and CDM models.
The results of the proposed work will be critical for testing the CDM paradigm with future data, and they will be made public. The broad education goals include fostering interest in physics among students through two programs at University of California, Irvine: Physics Roadshow, which takes physics demonstrations to elementary schools in the neighborhood, and COSMOS, which introduces highly motivated high school students to research in astronomy and astrophysics.
