Speaker
Description
The nature of dark matter (DM) on small scales remains uncertain, but recent theoretical and observational advances now allow us to constrain its properties more tightly. In this talk, I present two complementary approaches. First, we show that the correlation between internal velocities and sizes of dwarf galaxies is a sensitive probe of small-scale DM physics. Using modified DM power spectra, motivated by inflationary production mechanisms, we demonstrate that such models can alter dwarf galaxy structure without affecting overall abundance. Applying semi-analytic models to Milky Way and SDSS satellites, we constrain the power spectrum at comoving scales $4 Building on this, I present a forward-modeling framework that incorporates additional observables, including luminosities, to further constrain small-scale structure. We test three scenarios, Cold DM, Warm DM, and a blue-tilted (“lumpy”) model, and connect halo predictions to satellite properties via a probabilistic galaxy–halo connection. Comparing to SDSS data with a likelihood-based approach, we jointly probe dark matter and low-mass galaxy formation. Together, these results offer new and robust constraints on the small-scale matter power spectrum.
