Inferring warm dark matter masses with deep learning

Abstract

We present a new suite of over 1500 cosmological N-body simulations with varied warm dark matter (WDM) models ranging from 2.5 to 30 keV. We use these simulations to train Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to infer WDM particle masses from images of DM field data. Our fiducial setup can make accurate predictions of the WDM particle mass up to 7.5 keV with an uncertainty of ±0.5 keV at a 95 per cent confidence level from (25 h−1Mpc)2 maps. We vary the image resolution, simulation resolution, redshift, and cosmology of our fiducial setup to better understand how our model is making predictions. Using these variations, we find that our models are most dependent on simulation resolution, minimally dependent on image resolution, not systematically dependent on redshift, and robust to varied cosmologies. We also find that an important feature to distinguish between WDM models is present with a linear size between 100 and 200 h−1 kpc. We compare our fiducial model to one trained on the power spectrum alone and find that our field-level model can make two times more precise predictions and can make accurate predictions to two times as massive WDM particle masses when used on the same data. Overall, we find that the field-level data can be used to accurately differentiate between WDM models and contain more information than is captured by the power spectrum. This technique can be extended to more complex DM models and opens up new opportunities to explore alternative DM models in a cosmological environment.