HEP Theory Journal Club

Dissipative Dark Matter and the formation of a Dark Disk

Matteo Puel

McGill

Dark Matter (DM) understanding is one of the hardest challenges of present-day experimental and theoretical astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics. Although we need DM to explain several observations in the Universe, its nature still remains a mystery.

Since the only certain property we know about DM is its gravitational interaction with the visible sector and with itself, it becomes natural to look for smoking-gun effects that DM could have on the matter distribution of the Universe. Among them, the possibility for DM to form a Dark Disk (DD) co-rotating with the baryonic disk in spiral galaxies could have an impact, for instance, on the vertical motion of the stars in the Milky Way that might be detected by the current ESA's mission Gaia.

During this talk, I will review how we can build a simple model of DM that naturally predicts a DD around galaxies and which are its implications on observations, along with the current constraints. Finally, I will introduce briefly our idea to deepen our understanding of the properties of a DD in terms of N-body simulations of Partially-Interacting DM (PIDM).