Core formation from self-heating dark matter

Understand

Cosmological simulations of the $\Lambda$CDM model suggest that the dark matter halos of dwarf galaxies are denser in their center than what observational data of such galaxies imply.

• In this letter, we propose a novel solution to this problem by invoking a certain class of dark matter self-heating processes.
• As we will argue, such processes lead to the formation of dark matter cores at late times by considerably reducing the inner mass density of dwarf-sized halos.
• For deriving concrete results, we focus on semi-annihilating dark matter scenarios and model the inner region of dark matter halos as a gravothermal fluid.