New approaches to the structure and clustering of dark matter halos

In this talk, I'll introduce our recent studies, with an emphasis on the new approaches involved in understanding the structure and clustering of dark matter halos. Motivated by the local heat transport properties, we proposed to use an effective constant cross section to quantify the effect of dark matter scattering in individual halos. We use controlled N-body simulations to check the precision of our approximation. Then we apply the equation to cosmological zoom-in simulations of a Milky Way analog and study how different elastic scattering models can be distinguished. Our method gives rise to halo-level characteristics that could be associated with nodes in a graph of dark matter halos. Instead of applying graph-based techniques, we focused on the dynamics first and showed that the topology of dark matter halos could be described using the preferential attachment mechanism. Our attachment kernel encodes symmetry and physical effects, indicating that a "DNA" like encoder could be used to model the dynamics of a complex system. It is interesting to explore if there are more concrete examples following this approach. 

Related works:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.05578
https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.03392