The phase-space structure of a dark-matter halo: Implications for dark-matter direct detection experiments

We study the phase-space structure of a dark-matter halo formed in a high resolution simulation of a ΛCDM cosmology. Our goal is to quantify how much substructure is left over from the inhomogeneous growth of the halo, and how it may affect the signal in experiments aimed at detecting the dark matter particles directly. If we focus on the equivalent of “solar vicinity,” we find that the dark matter is smoothly distributed in space. The probability of detecting particles bound within dense lumps of individual mass less than ${10}^7{M}_{\odot }{h}^{-1}$ is small, less than ${10}^{-2}.$ The velocity ellipsoid in the solar neighborhood deviates only slightly from a multivariate Gaussian, and can be thought of as a superposition of thousands of kinematically cold streams. The motions of the most energetic particles are, however, strongly clumped and highly anisotropic. We conclude that experiments may safely assume a smooth multivariate Gaussian distribution to represent the kinematics of dark-matter particles in the solar neighborhood. Experiments sensitive to the direction of motion of the incident particles could exploit the expected anisotropy to learn about the recent merging history of our Galaxy.