Heating of baryons due to scattering with dark matter during the dark ages
By Julian B. Muñoz, E. Kovetz, Y. Ali-Haimoud. 2015
135 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We explore the effects of elastic scattering between dark matter and baryons on the 21-cm signal during the dark ages. In particular, we consider a dark-matter---baryon interaction with a cross section of the form $\sigma = \sigma_0 v^{-4}$, in which case the effect of the drag force between the dark matter and baryon fluids grows with time. We show that, as opposed to what was previously thought, this effect heats up the baryons due to the relative velocity between dark matter and baryons. This creates an additional source of fluctuations, which can potentially make interactions easier to detect by 21-cm measurements than by using the cosmic microwave background and the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest. Our forecasts show that the magnitude of the cross section can be probed to $\sigma_0\sim 3\times 10^{-42}$ cm$^2$ for $m_{\chi}\ll 1$ GeV and $\sigma_0\sim 2 \times 10^{-41}\ (m_{\chi}/10\, \rm GeV)$ cm$^2$ for $m_{\chi}\gg 1$ GeV with next generation experiments, and improved to $\sigma_0\sim 4\times 10^{-44}$ cm$^2$ for $m_{\chi} \ll 1$ GeV and $\sigma_0\sim 4 \times 10^{-43}\ (m_{\chi}/10\, \rm GeV)$ cm$^2$ for $m_{\chi}\gg 1$ GeV with futuristic experiments.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0da65892b87108100991eb596cf8ef7517a689f5
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Citations in the corpus
- Modeling the Radio Background from the First Black Holes at Cosmic Dawn: Implications for the 21 cm Absorption Amplitude (2018, background): “…Fialkov et al. (2018), and Muñoz & Loeb (2018) recently explored the possibility that the large amplitude of the absorption signal might be explained by the kinetic temperature being lowered through baryonic dark matter interactions, first discussed by Tashiro et al. (2014) and Muñoz et al. (2015).”