Caustics in growing cold dark matter haloes

Abstract

We simulate the growth of isolated dark matter haloes from self-similar and spherically symmetric initial conditions. Our N-body code integrates the geodesic deviation equation in order to track the streams and caustics associated with individual simulation particles. The radial orbit instability causes our haloes to develop major-to-minor axis ratios approaching 10 to 1 in their inner regions. They grow similarly in time and have similar density profiles to the spherical similarity solution, but their detailed structure is very different. The higher dimensionality of the orbits causes their stream and caustic densities to drop much more rapidly than in the similarity solution. This results in a corresponding increase in the number of streams at each point. At 1 per cent of the turnaround radius (corresponding roughly to the Sun's position in the Milky Way), we find of the order of 106 streams in our simulations, as compared to 102 in the similarity solution. The number of caustics in the inner halo increases by a factor of several, because a typical orbit has six turning points rather than one, but caustic densities drop by a much larger factor. This reduces the caustic contribution to the annihilation radiation. For the region between 1 and 50 per cent of the turnaround radius, this is 4 per cent of the total in our simulated haloes, as compared to 6.5 per cent in the similarity solution. Caustics contribute much less at smaller radii. These numbers assume a 100 GeV c-2 neutralino with present-day velocity dispersion 0.03 cm s-1, but reducing the dispersion by 10 orders of magnitude only doubles the caustic luminosity. We conclude that caustics will be unobservable in the inner parts of haloes. Only the outermost caustic might potentially be detectable. © 2009 RAS.