Hot dark matter is a cosmological research area focused on studying dark matter candidates that were relativistic, with thermal velocities near the speed of light, at the epoch of matter–radiation equality. This field investigates how such fast-moving particles, typically light neutrinos with eV-scale masses, affect structure formation by free-streaming and erasing primordial density fluctuations below a characteristic scale, leading to a top-down hierarchy of structure assembly. Research emphasizes constraining the hot dark matter fraction via cosmic microwave background anisotropies, large-scale structure surveys, Lyman-α forest data, and neutrino mass measurements, and comparing these constraints with those for cold and warm dark matter models.
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