Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

TITLE & ABSTRACT ADDED - Numerical simulations have played a crucial role in the development of modern cosmology and in the establishment of LCDM. In this talk, I will review the main results and the fundamental assumptions behind dark matter simulations. I will focus on the internal structure of halos and report on recent results on the formation and evolution of the very first halos to form in neutralino dark matter cosmologies. Then, I will discuss on attempts to model and study dark matter in the continuum limit. I will show how such methods help to overcome known problems of N-body simulations, and also how it is possible to get new insights into dark matter dynamics.