Related papers: Particle decays during the cosmic dark ages
The injection of secondary particles produced by Dark Matter (DM) annihilation at redshift 100<z<1000 affects the process of recombination, leaving an imprint on Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. Here we provide a new…
When CMB data are used to derive cosmological parameters, their very choice does matter: some parameter values can be biased if the parameter space does not cover the "true" model. This is a problem, because of the difficulty to parametrize…
Extra radiation injection after neutrino decoupling in the early Universe contributes to the effective number of neutrino species that can be constrained by the cosmic microwave background (CMB). However, any effective neutrino number…
We investigate the evolution of a universe with a decaying cosmological term (vacuum energy) that is assumed to be a function of the scale factor. In this model, while the cosmological term increases to the early universe, the radiation…
One of the best motivated hypotheses in cosmology states that most of the matter in the universe is in the form of weakly-interacting massive particles that decoupled early in the history of the universe and cooled adiabatically to an…
New decay channels for the neutron into dark matter plus other particles have been suggested for explaining a long-standing discrepancy between the neutron lifetime measured from trapped neutrons versus those decaying in flight. Many such…
We calculate the spectral distortions from Hawking evaporation of primordial black holes before the epoch of recombination, taking into account emission of all standard model particles, including quark and gluons, and evolving the resulting…
Recently it was shown that dark matter with mass of order the weak scale can be charged under a new long-range force, decoupled from the Standard Model, with only weak constraints from early Universe cosmology. Here we consider the…
We study the cosmological consequences of co-decaying dark matter - a recently proposed mechanism for depleting the density of dark matter through the decay of nearly degenerate particles. A generic prediction of this framework is an early…
Popular extensions of the standard model of particle physics feature new fields and symmetries which could, for example, dynamically generate neutrino masses from $B-L$ spontaneous symmetry breaking. If a new light scalar that decays into…
Motivated by the stunning projections for future CMB surveys, we evaluate the amount of dark radiation produced in the early Universe by two-body decays or binary scatterings with thermal bath particles via a rigorous analysis in momentum…
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…
We study the reionization histories where ionizing UV photons are emitted from decaying particles, in addition to usual contributions from stars and quasars, taking account of the fact that the universe is not fully ionized until z = 6 as…
We perform an empirical consistency test of General Relativity/dark energy by disentangling expansion history and growth of structure constraints. We replace each late-universe parameter that describes the behavior of dark energy with two…
A series of experiments measuring high-energy cosmic rays have recently reported strong indications for the existence of an excess of high-energy electrons and positrons. If interpreted in terms of the decay of dark matter particles, the…
The nature of dark matter remains unknown, but upcoming measurements probing the high-redshift Universe may provide invaluable insight. In the presence of dark matter-baryon scattering, the suppression in the matter power spectrum and the…
Inverse decays are an interesting avenue for producing dark matter in the early universe. We study in detail various phases of dark matter parameter space where inverse decays control its abundance, expanding on our work of INDY dark matter…
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…
The atomic recombination process leads to a softening of the matter equation of state as reflected by a reduced generalized adiabatic index, with accompanying heat release. We study the effects of this recombination softening and reheating…
Using the data of the Pierre Auger Observatory, we report on a search for signatures that would be suggestive of super-heavy particles decaying in the Galactic halo. From the lack of signal, we present upper limits for different energy…