Dark Matter Annihilation in the First Galaxy Halos

Understand

We investigate the impact of energy released from self-annihilating dark matter on heating of gas in the small, high-redshift dark matter halos thought to host the first stars.

• A SUSY neutralino like particle is implemented as our dark matter candidate.
• The PYTHIA code is used to model the final, stable particle distributions produced during the annihilation process.
• We use an analytic treatment in conjunction with the code MEDEA2 to find the energy transfer and subsequent partition into heating, ionizing and Lyman alpha photon components.