Related papers: Joint CMB and BBN Constraints on Light Dark Sector…
We consider theories where dark matter is composed of a thermal relic of weak scale mass, whose couplings to the Standard Model (SM) are however too small to give rise to the observed abundance. Instead, the abundance is set by annihilation…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) places a variety of model-independent constraints on the strength interactions of the dominant component of dark matter with the Standard Model. Percent-level subcomponents of the dark matter can evade…
Current observational data favor cosmological models which differ from the standard model due to the presence of some form of dark energy and, perhaps, by additional contributions to the more familiar dark matter. Primordial nucleosynthesis…
New light states thermally coupled to the Standard Model plasma alter the expansion history of the Universe and impact the synthesis of the primordial light elements. In this work, we carry out an exhaustive and precise analysis of the…
We consider the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) bounds on light dark matter whose cross section off nucleons is sufficiently large to enable acceleration by scattering off of cosmic rays in the local galaxy. Such accelerated DM could then…
Light dark matter is a compelling experimental target in light of stringent constraints on heavier WIMPs. However, for a sub-MeV WIMP, the universe is sufficiently well understood at temperatures below 10 MeV that there is no room for it to…
In a popular class of models, dark matter comprises an asymmetric population of composite particles with short range interactions arising from a confined nonabelian gauge group. We show that coupling this sector to a well-motivated light…
Minimal atomic dark matter with its distinctive cooling mechanisms offers an instructive framework for understanding the potential impact of dark matter on small-scale structure formation and early cosmology. The model consists of two…
We derive new bounds on hadronically-interacting, sub-GeV mass dark matter. First, we show that one-loop interactions with photons can be sufficient to maintain equilibrium between the dark matter and Standard Model sectors at MeV…
Thermal relics lighter than an MeV contribute to the energy density of the universe at the time of nucleosynthesis and recombination. Constraints on extra radiation degrees of freedom typically exclude even the simplest of such dark…
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…
We use the framework of dark matter effective field theories to study the complementarity of bounds for a dark matter particle with mass in the MeV range. Taking properly into account the mixing between operators induced by the…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) determinations of the baryon-to-photon ratio $\eta \propto \Omega_{\rm baryon} h^2$ will remove the last free parameter from (standard) big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) calculations. This will make BBN a much…
Short baseline neutrino experiments such as LSND and MiniBooNE seem to suggest the existence of light sterile neutrinos. Meanwhile, current cosmic microwave background (CMB) and big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) measurements place an upper…
New light species can contribute to the number of effective relativistic degrees of freedom ($N_{\rm eff}$) at Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) which is precisely measured by Planck. In this work, we consider an MeV scale thermally…
We extend previous studies of big bang nucleosynthesis, with the assumption that ordinary matter and dark matter sectors are entangled through the number of degrees of freedom entering the Friedmann equations. This conjecture allows us to…
A light ($m_{\nu d} \lesssim $ MeV) dark fermion mixing with the Standard Model neutrinos can naturally equilibrate with the neutrinos via oscillations and scattering. In the presence of dark sector interactions, production of dark fermions…
The term dark radiation is used both to describe a noninteracting neutrino species and as a correction to the Friedmann Equation in the simplest five-dimensional RS-II brane-world cosmology. In this paper we consider the constraints on both…
Dark matter is poorly constrained by direct detection experiments at masses below 1 MeV. This is an important target for the next generation of experiments, and several methods have been proposed to probe this mass range. One class of such…
Any neutral boson such as a dark photon or dark Higgs that is part of a non-standard sector of particles can mix with its standard model counterpart. When very weakly mixed with the Standard Model, these particles are produced in the early…