Dark matter annihilation in the first galaxy haloes

We investigate the impact of energy released from self-annihilating dark matter (DM) on heating of gas in the small, high-redshift DM haloes thought to host the first stars. A super-symmetric (SUSY)-neutralino-like particle is implemented as our DM 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 α photon components. We consider a number of halo density models, DM particle masses and annihilation channels. We find that the injected energy from DM exceeds the binding energy of the gas within a 10⁵-10⁶ M_⊙ halo at redshifts above 20, preventing star formation in early haloes in which primordial gas would otherwise cool. Thus we find that DM annihilation could delay the formation of the first galaxies.