Related papers: Particle decays during the cosmic dark ages
A simple speed-up cosmology model is proposed to account for the dark energy puzzle. We condense contributions from dark energy and curvature term into one effective parameter in order to reduce parameter degeneracies and to find any…
Cosmological parameter constraints from the CMB power spectra alone suffer several well-known degeneracies. These degeneracies can be broken by numerical artefacts and also a variety of physical effects that become quantitatively important…
The energy injected from dark matter annihilation and decay processes potentially raises the ionisation of the intergalactic medium and leaves visible footprints on the anisotropy maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Galactic…
Dark matter energy injection in the early universe modifies both the ionization history and the temperature of the intergalactic medium. In this work, we improve the CMB bounds on sub-keV dark matter and extend previous bounds from…
Numerous observations point towards the existence of an unknown elementary particle with no electromagnetic interactions, a large population of which was presumably produced in the early stages of the history of the Universe. This so-called…
There is a long-standing discrepancy between the neutron lifetime measured in beam and bottle experiments. We propose to explain this anomaly by a dark decay channel for the neutron, involving one or more dark sector particles in the final…
We calculate the post-recombination contribution to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectral distortion due to general exotic energy injections, including dark matter (DM) decaying or annihilating to Standard Model particles. Upon…
The physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of processes, still finding potentially measurable…
The International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) satellite has yielded unprecedented measurements of the soft gamma-ray spectrum of our Galaxy. Here we use those measurements to set constraints on dark matter (DM) that decays…
Many models of dark matter contain more than one new particle beyond those in the Standard Model. Often heavier particles decay into the lightest dark matter particle as the Universe evolves. Here we explore the possibilities that arise if…
High-precision measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background radiation have been previously employed to set robust constraints on dark matter annihilation during recombination. In this work…
The thermal and expansion history of the Universe before big bang nucleosynthesis is unknown. We investigate the evolution of cosmological perturbations through the transition from an early matter era to radiation domination. We treat…
Patchy reionization leaves a number of imprints on the small-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations, the largest of which is the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ), the Doppler shift of CMB photons scattering off…
We investigate models that suggest that the vacuum energy decays into cold dark matter (CDM) and into a homogeneous distribution of a thermalized cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is characteristic of an adiabatic vacuum energy decay…
Dark Matter annihilations after recombination and during the epoch of structure formation deposit energy in the primordial intergalactic medium, producing reionization and heating. We investigate the constraints that are imposed by the…
Dark energy can be studied by its influence on the expansion of the Universe as well as on the growth history of the large-scale structure. In this paper, we follow the growth of the cosmic density field in early dark energy cosmologies by…
Mainly used to set constraints on cosmological parameters, CMB anisotropies can give information on primordial universe. Unfortunately, initial conditions and late time cosmology are degenerated. I focus on the effect of the shape of the…
We present constraints on decaying and annihilating dark matter (DM) in the 4 keV to 10 GeV mass range, using published results from the satellites HEAO-1, INTEGRAL, COMPTEL, EGRET, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. We derive…
A massive particle decaying into neutrinos in the early Universe is known to be less constrained than if it was decaying into other standard model particles. However, even if the decay proceeds into neutrinos, the latter still inevitably…
The search for a particle dark matter signal in terms of radiation produced by dark matter annihilation or decay has to cope with the extreme faintness of the predicted signal and the presence of masking astrophysical backgrounds. It has…