  We investigate the impact of energy released from self-annihilating dark
matter on heating of gas in the small, high-redshift dark matter halos thought
to host the first stars. A SUSY neutralino like particle is implemented as our
dark matter 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 alpha photon
components. We consider a number of halo density models, dark matter particle
masses and annihilation channels. We find that the injected energy from dark
matter exceeds the binding energy of the gas within a $10^5$ - $10^6$ M$_\odot$
halo at redshifts above 20, preventing star formation in early halos in which
primordial gas would otherwise cool. Thus we find that DM annihilation could
delay the formation of the first galaxies.
