Related papers: Revisiting CMB constraints on dark matter annihila…
While cosmological and astrophysical probes suggest that dark matter would make up for 85% of the total matter content of the Universe, the determination of its nature remains one of the greatest challenges of fundamental physics. Assuming…
The dark-matter candidates of particle physics invariably possess electromagnetic interactions, if only via quantum fluctuations. Taken en masse, dark matter can thus engender an index of refraction which deviates from its vacuum value. Its…
A thermal relic, often referred to as a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), is a particle produced during the early evolution of the Universe whose present (relic) abundance depends only on its mass and its thermally averaged…
We study the effects of dark-matter annihilation during the epoch of big-bang nucleosynthesis on the primordial abundances of light elements. We improve the calculation of the light-element abundances by taking into account the effects of…
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment has detected reionization at the $5.5 \sigma$ level and has reported a mean optical depth of $0.088 \pm 0.015$. A powerful probe of reionization is the large-angle $EE$ polarization…
Recent measurements of cosmic-ray electron and positron fluxes by PAMELA and ATIC experiments may indicate the existence of annihilating dark matter with large annihilation cross section. We show that the dark matter annihilation in the…
Recent gamma-ray observations and radio observations put strong constraints on the parameters of dark matter annihilation. In this article, we derive new constraints for six standard model annihilation channels by using the recent radio…
An era of kination occurs when the Universe's energy density is dominated by a fast-rolling scalar field. Dark matter that is thermally produced during an era of kination requires larger-than-canonical annihilation cross sections to…
We propose a method to extract the projected power spectrum of density perturbations from the distortions in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The distortions are imprinted onto the CMB by the gravitational lensing effect and can be…
A time variation in the Higgs vacuum expectation value alters the electron mass and thereby changes the ionization history of the universe. This change produces a measurable imprint on the pattern of cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
We calculate the reionization history for different models of the stellar population and explore the effects of primordial magnetic fields, dark matter decay and dark matter annihilation on reionization. We find that stellar populations…
A dark radiation term arises as a correction to the energy momentum tensor in the simplest five-dimensional RS-II brane-world cosmology. In this paper we revisit the constraints on dark radiation based upon the newest results for…
One of the main goals of modern cosmic microwave background (CMB) missions is to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ accurately to constrain inflation models. Due to ignorance about the reionization history $X_{e}(z)$, this analysis is…
In co-annihilation scenarios, the weakly interacting dark matter particle (WIMP) is close in mass to another particle that can decay into the WIMP. As a result, both particles freeze out at roughly the same time in the early universe, and…
In this paper, the annihilation of dark matter $f_d\epsilon_0$ with nonzero equation of state $w_{dm}$ was studied by using the currently available cosmic observations which include the geometric and dynamic measurements. The constrained…
We compute cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy constraints on exotic forms of energy injection in electromagnetic (e.m.) channels over a large range of timescales. These constraints are very powerful around or just after…
We investigate the impact of a stochastic background of Primordial Magnetic Fields (PMF) generated before recombination on the ionization history of the Universe and on the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB). Pre-recombination PMFs…
We present a new public Python package, DarkHistory, for computing the effects of dark matter annihilation and decay on the temperature and ionization history of the early universe. DarkHistory simultaneously solves for the evolution of the…
We study the effects of modifying the expansions history of the Universe on Dark Matter freezeout. We derived a modified Boltzmann equation for freeze-out for an arbitrary energy density in the early Universe and provide an analytic…
We study how uncertainty in the reionization history of the universe affects estimates of other cosmological parameters from the Cosmic Microwave Background. We analyze WMAP7 data and synthetic Planck-quality data generated using a…