English

Could the 21-cm absorption be explained by the dark matter suggested by $^8$Be transitions?

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2018-12-05 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

The stronger than expected 21-cm absorption was observed by EDGES recently, and another anomaly of 8^8Be transitions would be signatures of new interactions. These two issues may be related to each other, e.g., pseudoscalar AA mediated fermionic millicharged dark matter (DM), and the 21-cm absorption could be induced by photon mediated scattering between MeV millicharged DM and hydrogen. This will be explored in this paper. For fermionic millicharged DM χˉχ\bar{\chi} \chi with masses in a range of 2mA<2mχ<3mA2 m_A < 2 m_{\chi} < 3 m_A, the p-wave annihilation χˉχAA\bar{\chi} \chi \to A A would be dominant during DM freeze-out. The s-wave annihilation χˉχ\bar{\chi} \chi A,γ\to A, \gamma e+e\to e^+ e^- is tolerant by constraints from CMB and the 21-cm absorption. The millicharged DM can evade constraints from direct detection experiments. The process of K+π+π0K^+ \to \pi^+ \pi^0 with the invisible decay π0χˉχ\pi^0 \to \bar{\chi} \chi could be employed to search for the millicharged DM, and future high intensity K+K^+ sources, such as NA62, will do the job.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.00177,
  title  = {Could the 21-cm absorption be explained by the dark matter suggested by $^8$Be transitions?},
  author = {Lian-Bao Jia and Xian-Jin Deng and Chang-Fu Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.00177},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

6 pages, 2 figures, the accepted version, EPJC