Probing substructure with cold stellar streams: the diffusion regime
Abstract
Cold tidal streams from disrupting globular clusters offer a promising probe to constrain substructure (small-scale potential perturbations) in the Milky Way halo, purely gravitationally. While the bulk of the literature has focused on strong perturbations (“gaps”), I will present a new approach to describing the stream-substructure interaction, which considers the much more prevalent weak stream perturbations. This approach allows us to directly and semi-analytically predict statistics such as the one-dimensional power spectrum of stellar density and velocity along the stream