The EDGES 21 cm anomaly and properties of dark matter
By Sean Fraser, A. Hektor, Gert Hütsi, K. Kannike, C. Marzo, L. Marzola, A. Racioppi, M. Raidal, C. Spethmann, V. Vaskonen and 1 more. Physics Letters B, 2018
137 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The recently claimed anomaly in the measurement of the 21 cm hydrogen absorption signal by EDGES at z ∼ 17 , if cosmological, requires the existence of new physics. The possible attempts to resolve the anomaly rely on either (i) cooling the hydrogen gas via new dark matter-hydrogen interactions or (ii) modifying the soft photon background beyond the standard CMB one, as possibly suggested also by the ARCADE 2 excess. We argue that solutions belonging to the first class are generally in tension with cosmological dark matter probes once simple dark sector models are considered. Therefore, we propose soft photon emission by light dark matter as a natural solution to the 21 cm anomaly, studying a few realizations of this scenario. We find that the signal singles out a photophilic dark matter candidate characterised by an enhanced collective decay mechanism, such as axion mini-clusters.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9eb6f52b26e59b00ff7fdde3fa0ae879b948933b
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- G. Mellema
- Ilian Iliev
- Benedetta Ciardi
- Tzu-Ching Chang
- Joop Schaye
- Florent Mertens
- A. Ewall-Wice
- S. Zaroubi
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
- Florent Mertens
- Joop Schaye
- A. Ewall-Wice
- G. Mellema
- M. Silva
- Leon V. E. Koopmans
- Tzu-Ching Chang
- Ilian Iliev
Citations in the corpus
- Improved upper limits on the 21 cm signal power spectrum of neutral hydrogen at z ≈ 9.1 from LOFAR (2020, background): “This signal, consisting of a flat-bottomed deep absorption-line feature during the CD at z = 14−21, is considerably stronger and wider than predicted (Fraser et al. 2018), and, depending on the additional mechanism invoked to explain it (e.g. Barkana et al. 2018; Berlin et al. 2018; Ewall-Wice et…”
- Modeling the Radio Background from the First Black Holes at Cosmic Dawn: Implications for the 21 cm Absorption Amplitude (2018, background): “They include cosmic rays accelerated in supernovae (Mirocha & Furlanetto 2018) and instabilities in mini-clusters of axionic dark matter (Fraser et al. 2018).”