Related papers: Particle decays during the cosmic dark ages
A number of theories, spanning a wide range of mass scales, predict dark matter candidates that have lifetimes much longer than the age of the universe, yet may produce a significant flux of gamma rays in their decays today. We constrain…
It is attractive to suppose for several astrophysical reasons that the universe has close to the critical density in light (~30 eV) neutrinos which decay radiatively with a lifetime of ~10^{23} sec. In such a cosmology the universe is…
Precise measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background can be used to constrain the annihilation and decay of dark matter. In this work, we demonstrate via principal component analysis that…
Dark Matter annihilation or decay can affect the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Therefore, the CMB data can be used to constrain the properties of a dark matter particle. In this work, we use the new CMB data obtained…
Spectral distortions (SDs) of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide a powerful tool for studying particle physics. Here we compute the distortion signals from decaying particles that convert directly into photons at different epochs…
We consider a cosmological model in which a fraction $f$ of the Dark Matter (DM) is allowed to decay in an invisible relativistic component, and compute the resulting constraints on both the decay width (or inverse lifetime) $\Gamma$ and…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) constraints on dark matter annihilation are a uniquely powerful tool in the quest to understand the nature of dark matter. Annihilation of dark matter to Standard Model particles between recombination and…
The recombination history of the Universe provides a useful tool for constraining the annihilation of dark matter particles. Even a small fraction of dark matter particles annihilated during the cosmic dark age can provide sufficient energy…
We show that there exists only a quite limited number of higher dimensional operators which can naturally lead to a slow decay of dark matter particles into monochromatic photons. As each of these operators inevitably induces decays into…
Embedded defects are predicted in a host of particle physics theories, in particular in the standard electroweak theory. They can be stabilized by interactions with the cosmological plasma, but will decay once the plasma falls out of…
We investigate the possibility that the Universe is reionized by the decay products of heavy particles. In particular we study under which circumstances this decay may produce a significant reionization at high redshift ($z \simeq 20$), as…
We derive constraints on the injection of free-streaming dark radiation after big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) by considering the decay of a massive hidden sector particle into dark radiation. Such a scenario has the potential to alleviate…
It has been argued that the power spectrum of the anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) may be effectively degenerate, namely that the observable spectrum does not determine a unique set of cosmological parameters. We…
Based on almost 20 years of data collected by the high-resolution spectrometer SPI on board the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) we present constraints on a decaying dark matter particle undergoing a decay into two…
Any injection of electromagnetically interacting particles during the cosmic dark ages will lead to increased ionization, heating, production of Lyman-alpha photons and distortions to the energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background,…
The temperature fluctuations and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are now a well-known probe of the Universe at an infant age of 400,000 years. During the transit to us from the surface of last scattering, the CMB…
If moduli, or other long-lived heavy states, decay in the early universe in part into light and feebly interacting particles (such as axions), these decay products could account for the additional energy density in radiation that is…
We revisit a cosmological constraint on dark matter decaying into dark radiation at late times. In Enqvist et al. (2015), we mainly focused on the effects of decaying dark matter (DDM) on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and nonlinear…
We use data from observational cosmology to put constraints on higher-dimensional extensions of general relativity in which the effective four-dimensional dark-energy density (or cosmological "constant") decays with time. In particular we…
The radiation background produced by the 21 cm spin-flip transition of neutral hydrogen at high redshifts can be a pristine probe of fundamental physics and cosmology. At z~30-300, the intergalactic medium (IGM) is visible in 21 cm…