The AIDA-TNG project: Abundance, radial distribution, and clustering properties of halos in alternative dark matter models

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “A. Righi” – Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna via Piero Gobetti 93/2 40129 Bologna, Italy
² INAF – Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio di Bologna via Piero Gobetti 93/3 40129 Bologna, Italy
³ INFN – Sezione di Bologna Viale Berti Pichat 6/2 40127 Bologna, Italy
⁴ Department of Physics, Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge MA 02139, USA

^★ Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 24 November 2025
Accepted: 26 January 2026

Abstract

Warm and self-interactive dark matter cosmologies have been proposed as nonbaryonic solutions to the tensions between the Λ cold dark matter model and observations at the kiloparsec scale. In this paper, we used the dark matter-only runs of the AIDA-TNG project, a set of cosmological simulations of different sizes and resolutions, to analyze the macroscopic impact of alternative dark matter models on the abundance, radial distribution, and clustering properties of halos. We adopted the halo occupation distribution formalism to characterize the evolution of its parameters M₁ and α with the mass and redshift selection of our sample. By dividing the halo population into centrals and satellites, we were able to study their spatial density profile. We found that a Navarro-Frenk-White model is not accurate enough to describe the radial distribution of subhalos and that a generalized Navarro-Frenk-White model is required instead. Warm dark matter models, in particular, present a cuspier distribution of satellites, whereas self-interacting dark matter exhibits a shallower density profile. Moreover, we found that the small-scale clustering of dark matter halos provides a powerful tool for distinguishing among alternative dark matter scenarios, in preparation for a more detailed study that fully incorporates baryonic effects and for a comparison with observational data from galaxy clustering.