Related papers: Particle decays during the cosmic dark ages
If dark matter decays to electromagnetically-interacting particles, it can inject energy into the baryonic gas and thus affect the processes of recombination and reionization. This leaves an imprint on the cosmic microwave background (CMB):…
The cosmic microwave background provides constraints on the annihilation and decay of light dark matter at redshifts between 100 and 1000, the strength of which depends upon the fraction of energy ending up in the form of electrons and…
Dark matter particles need not be completely stable, and in fact they may be decaying now. We consider this possibility in the frameworks of universal extra dimensions and supersymmetry with very late decays of WIMPs to Kaluza-Klein…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations suggest the possibility of an extra dark radiation component, while the current evidence from big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is more ambiguous. Dark radiation from a decaying particle can…
We re-formulate cosmological perturbations in the decaying cold dark matter model, and calculate cosmological microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. By comparing our theoretical predictions with recent observational data from the…
We present a study of cosmological implications of generic dark matter decays. We consider two-body and many-body decaying scenarios. In the two-body case the massive particle has a possibly relativistic kick velocity and thus possesses a…
Dark Matter (DM) annihilation and decay during the Dark Ages can affect the cosmic ionization history and leave imprints in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy spectra. CMB polarization anisotropy can be sensitive to such…
The Dark Ages and the Cosmic Dawn are an untapped well of information about the particle physics properties of dark matter, which may become accessible with future radio telescopes able to probe the 21-cm signal from atomic hydrogen. In…
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…
Damping of magnetic fields via ambipolar diffusion and decay of magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) turbulence in the post decoupling era heats the intergalactic medium (IGM). Delayed recombination of hydrogen atoms in the IGM yields an optical…
Progress in observational cosmology over the past five years has established that the Universe is dominated dynamically by dark matter and dark energy. Both these new and apparently independent forms of matter-energy have properties that…
If the dark matter is unstable, the decay of these particles throughout the universe and in the halo of the Milky Way could contribute significantly to the isotropic gamma-ray background (IGRB) as measured by Fermi. In this article, we…
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.…
Dark matter annihilation or de-excitation, decay of metastable species, or other new physics may inject energetic electrons and photons into the photon-baryon fluid during and after recombination. As such particles cool, they partition…
We present a complete analysis of the cosmological constraints on decaying dark matter. Previous analyses have used the cosmic microwave background and Type Ia supernova. We have updated them with the latest data as well as extended the…
We use the latest cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations to provide updated constraints on the dark matter lifetime as well as on p-wave suppressed annihilation cross sections in the 1 MeV to 1 TeV mass range. In contrast to…
The cold dark matter may be in a meta-stable state and decays to other particles with a very long lifetime. If the decaying products of the dark matter are weakly interacting, e.g. neutrinos, then it would have little impact on…
We study particle decay as the origin of dark radiation. After elaborating general properties and useful parametrisations we provide model-independent and easy-to-use constraints from nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background and…
The consideration of dark energy's quanta, required also by thermodynamics, introduces its chemical potential into the cosmological equations. Isolating its main contribution, we obtain solutions with dark energy decaying to matter or…
We use measurements of the intergalactic medium (IGM) temperature from the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest to place new limits on models in which long-lived dark sector (DS) particles, with lifetimes longer than $10^{16}$ s, deposit energy into the…