Event

On large scales the Universe is well described by a cosmological model where matter primarily comprises cold dark matter (CDM), a single collision-less particle species with negligible primordial thermal dispersion. On galactic scales, numerical CDM-only simulations predict identical rotation curves for fixed dark matter halo mass. However, observed dwarf galaxies exhibit diverse rotation curves. The addition of galaxy formation (baryonic) physics in which star formation and subsequent feedback rearrange central dark matter densities has been proposed as a solution to the diversity of rotation curves problem. An alternative solution is dark matter self-interactions which collisionally thermalize dark matter particles and alter central halo densities. In this seminar, I will discuss a suite of high-resolution zoom-in dwarf galaxy simulations aimed to cohesively explore dwarf galaxy diversity in CDM with baryons and multiple models of self-interacting dark matter with and without baryons.