General constraints on dark matter decay from the cosmic microwave background

By T. Slatyer, Chih-Liang Wu. 2016

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 the imprint of dark matter decay on the cosmic microwave background can be approximately parameterized by a single number for any given dark matter model. We develop a simple prescription for computing this model-dependent detectability factor, and demonstrate how this approach can be used to set model-independent bounds on a large class of decaying dark matter scenarios. We repeat our analysis for decay lifetimes shorter than the age of the universe, allowing us to set constraints on metastable species other than the dark matter decaying at early times, and decays that only liberate a tiny fraction of the dark matter mass energy. We set precise bounds and validate our principal component analysis using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach and Planck 2015 data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d5e7126ed5199f519a557961f6c7c3944513cfd

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Citations in the corpus

INTEGRAL constraints on primordial black holes and particle dark matter (2020, methodology): “In this case the INTEGRAL data provides stronger constraints than the CMB [67] and NuSTAR observations [75].”
Cosmological constraints on exotic injection of electromagnetic energy (2016, background): “Note added: While this paper was been finalized, the article [65] has appeared, which has”