Related papers: Intergalactic medium heating by dark matter
We use an analytic model to study how inhomogeneous hydrogen reionization affects the temperature distribution of the intergalactic medium (IGM). During this process, the residual energy of each ionizing photon is deposited in the IGM as…
Upcoming measurements of the highly redshifted 21cm line with next-generation radio telescopes such as HERA and SKA will provide the intriguing opportunity to probe dark matter (DM) physics during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), Cosmic…
In currently popular cosmological scenarios -- all variants of the cold dark matter (CDM) cosmogony -- some time beyond a redshift of 15, stars within the numerous small halos that condense with virial temperatures ~1e4 K created the first…
According to the photo-heating model of the intergalactic medium (IGM), He II reionization is expected to affect its thermal evolution. Evidence for additional energy injection into the IGM has been found at $3\lesssim z\lesssim4$, though…
The thermal history of the intergalactic medium (IGM) after reionization is to a large extent determined by photoheating. Here we demonstrate that calculations of the photoheating rate which neglect radiative transfer effects substantially…
Dark matter (DM) annihilations in the Galaxy may produce high energy neutrinos, which can be detected by the neutrino telescopes, for example IceCube, ANTARES and Super-Kamiokande. The neutrinos can also arise from hadronic interaction…
We derive new constraints on models of decaying and annihilating dark matter (DM) by requiring that the energy injected into the intergalactic medium (IGM) not overheat it at late times, when measurements of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest…
Sterile neutrinos can be a possible candidate for dark matter. Sterile neutrinos are radiatively unstable and can inject photon energy into the intergalactic medium (IGM). The injection of photon energy into IGM can modify the temperature…
Sterile neutrinos offer a minimal and testable explanation for dark matter (DM), with their radiative decay actively searched for in X-ray observations. We show that cold sterile neutrino DM can be efficiently produced during reheating from…
We use numerical hydrodynamical simulations of early structure formation in a LCDM universe to investigate the spin temperature and 21cm brightness of the diffuse intergalactic medium (IGM) prior to the epoch of cosmic reionization, at…
We study the cosmological signatures of Invisibly Annihilating Dark Matter (IAnDM), where DM annihilates into dark radiation particles that are decoupled from the Standard Model (SM). In the simple benchmark model we consider here, such…
We study the temperature structure of the intergalactic medium (IGM) using a large cosmological N-body/SPH simulation. We employ a two-temperature model for the thermal evolution of the ionized gas, in which the relaxation process between…
Dark-matter particles like neutralinos should decouple from the hot cosmic plasma at temperatures of about 40 GeV. Later they can annihilate each other into standard-model particles, which are injected into the dense primordial plasma and…
The energy released from dark matter (DM) annihilation leads to additional ionization and heating of the intergalactic gas, impacting the hydrogen 21-cm signal during the cosmic dawn. The dark matter annihilation rate scales with its…
The dynamics of cosmic reheating, that is, on how the energy stored in the inflaton is transferred to the standard model (SM) thermal bath, is largely unknown. In this work, we show that the phenomenology of the nonbaryonic dark matter (DM)…
During the epoch of reionization a large number of photons were produced with frequencies below the hydrogen Lyman limit. After redshifting into the closest resonance, these photons underwent multiple scatterings with atoms. We examine the…
We have discussed in detail how neutrinos produced from inflaton solely through gravitational interaction can successfully reheat the universe. For this, we have introduced the well-known Type-I seesaw neutrino model. Depending on seesaw…
We study the case of DM self annihilation, in order to assess its importance as an energy injection mechanism, to the IGM in general, and to the medium within particular DM haloes. We consider thermal relic WIMP particles with masses of…
Decay of the inflaton or moduli which dominated the energy density of the universe at early times leads to a matter to radiation transition epoch. We consider non-thermal sterile dark matter particles produced as decay product during such…
This Letter investigates the amount of dust in the intergalactic medium (IGM). The dust photoelectric heating can be the most efficient heating mechanism in the IGM where the density is very small and there are a lot of hard ultraviolet…