English

CMB and Lyman-$\alpha$ constraints on dark matter decays to photons

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2023-06-30 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Dark matter energy injection in the early universe modifies both the ionization history and the temperature of the intergalactic medium. In this work, we improve the CMB bounds on sub-keV dark matter and extend previous bounds from Lyman-α\alpha observations to the same mass range, resulting in new and competitive constraints on axion-like particles (ALPs) decaying into two photons. The limits depend on the underlying reionization history, here accounted self-consistently by our modified version of the publicly available {\tt DarkHistory} and {\tt CLASS} codes. Future measurements such as the ones from the CMB-S4 experiment may play a crucial, leading role in the search for this type of light dark matter candidates.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.07426,
  title  = {CMB and Lyman-$\alpha$ constraints on dark matter decays to photons},
  author = {Francesco Capozzi and Ricardo Z. Ferreira and Laura Lopez-Honorez and Olga Mena},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.07426},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

18 pages, 8 figures, Version to appear on JCAP. Our modified version of CLASS is available at https://github.com/llopezho/CLASS_DMdecay