Collisional versus Collisionless Dark Matter

We compare the structure and substructure of dark matter halos in model universes dominated by collisional, strongly self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) and collisionless, weakly interacting dark matter (CDM). While SIDM virialized halos are more nearly spherical than CDM halos, they can be rotationally flattened by as much as 20% in their inner regions. Substructure halos suffer ram-pressure truncation and drag, which are more rapid and severe than their gravitational counterparts tidal stripping and dynamical friction. Lensing constraints on the size of galactic halos in clusters are a factor of 2 smaller than predicted by gravitational stripping, and the recent detection of tidal streams of stars escaping from the satellite galaxy Carina suggests that its tidal radius is close to its optical radius of a few hundred parsecs-an order of magnitude smaller than predicted by CDM models but consistent with SIDM models. The orbits of SIDM satellites suffer significant velocity bias, sigmaSIDMsigmaCDM=0.85, and are more circular than CDM satellites, betaSIDM approximately 0.5, in agreement with the inferred orbits of the Galaxy's satellites. In the limit of a short mean free path, SIDM halos have singular isothermal density profiles; thus, in its simplest incarnation SIDM, is inconsistent with galactic rotation curves.