caustics, cold flows, and annual modulation焦散线、冷流,和年度调制.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Astronomy Volume 2011, Article ID 285346, 11 pages doi:10.1155/2011/285346 Research Article Caustics, Cold Flows, and Annual Modulation Aravind Natarajan Department of Physics, McWilliams Center for Cosmology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Aravind Natarajan, anat@ Received 29 June 2010; Accepted 16 August 2010 Academic Editor: Andrew Fruchter Copyright © 2011 Aravind Natarajan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We discuss the formation of dark matter caustics, and their possible detection by future dark matter experiments. The annual modulation expected in the recoil rate measured by a dark matter detector is discussed. We consider the example of dark matter particles with a Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution modified by a cold stream due to a nearby caustic. It is shown that the effect of the caustic flow is potentially detectable, even when the density enhancement due to the caustic is small. This makes the annual modulation effect an excellent probe of inner caustics. We also show that the phase of the annual modulation at low recoil energies does not constrain the particle mass unless the velocity distribution of particles in the solar neighborhood is known. 1. Introduction inverse square root of the distance from the smooth curve. As long as one is far from the boundary between the two Caustics of light have been known since ancient times