Related papers: Sub-keV dark matter can strongly ionize molecular …
We demonstrate that ionization of $\text{H}_2$ by dark matter in dense molecular clouds can provide strong constraints on the scattering strength of dark matter with electrons. Molecular clouds have high UV-optical attenuation, shielding…
The density of cosmic rays inside molecular clouds determines the ionization rate in the dense cores where stars form. It is also one of the drivers of astrochemistry leading to the creation of complex molecules. Through Fermi Large Area…
Despite decades of direct and indirect searches within the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) framework, no conclusive results have been found in the GeV--TeV range. This has motivated exploring alternatives, including new particles…
Cosmic reionization and dark matter decay can impact observations of the cosmic microwave sky in a similar way. A simultaneous study of both effects is required to constrain unstable dark matter from cosmic microwave background…
Optically dense clouds in the interstellar medium composed predominantly of molecular hydrogen, known as molecular clouds, are sensitive to energy injection in the form of photon absorption, cosmic-ray scattering, and dark matter (DM)…
Deuterium fractionation in molecular ions, in particular HCO+, has been extensively used to estimate the degree of ionization in molecular clouds. This paper reviews recent work on ionization degree in homogeneous clouds. We will show that…
Clouds containing molecular dark matter in quantities relevant for star formation may exist in minihaloes of the type of cold dark matter included in many cosmological simulations or in the regions of some galaxies extending far beyond…
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…
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…
Cosmological and astrophysical observations provide increasing evidence of the existence of dark matter in our Universe. Dark matter particles with a mass above a few GeV can be captured by the Sun, accumulate in the core, annihilate, and…
We consider the possibility that the cosmological dark matter consists of particles very close in mass to new colored particles below the TeV scale. While such a scenario is inherently difficult to directly confirm at colliders, we find…
If dark matter decay or annihilate, a large amount of energy and particles would be released into the cosmic plasma. Therefore, they could modify the thermal and ionization history of our universe, then leave footprints on the cosmic…
We investigate the process of reionisation in a model in which the dark matter is a warm elementary particle such as a sterile neutrino. We focus on models that are consistent with the dark matter decay interpretation of the recently…
If a component of cosmological dark matter is made up of massive particles - such as sterile neutrinos - that decay with cosmological lifetime to emit photons, the reionization history of the universe would be affected, and cosmic microwave…
There is an ongoing and future experimental program searching for axions as both extensions of the Standard Model and as candidates for the observed dark matter. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of being able to pin down precise…
In warm dark matter scenarios structure formation is suppressed on small scales with respect to the cold dark matter case, reducing the number of low-mass halos and the fraction of ionized gas at high redshifts and thus, delaying…
The temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have been used to set constraints on decaying dark matter models down to keV masses. In this work, we extend these limits down to the sub-keV mass range.…
We will here discuss how the gamma-ray emission from molecular clouds can be used to probe the cosmic ray flux in distant regions of the Galaxy and to constrain the highly unknown cosmic ray diffusion coefficient. In particular we will…
There exists considerable interest in dark matter candidates that can reduce cosmological structure at sub-galactic scales through a suppression of the power spectrum of primordial perturbations as well as have a primordial velocity…
Under the assumption that dark matter is made of new particles, annihilations of those are required to reproduce the correct dark matter abundance in the Universe. This process can occur in dense regions of our Galaxy such as the Galactic…