Dark radiation constraints on minicharged particles in models with a hidden photon

By H. Vogel, J. Redondo. 2013

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We compute the thermalization of a hidden sector consisting of minicharged fermions (MCPs) and massless hidden photons in the early Universe. The precise measurement of the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by Planck and the relic abundance of light nuclei produced during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) constrain the amount of dark radiation of this hidden sector through the effective number of neutrino species, Neff. This study presents novel and accurate predictions of dark radiation in the strongly and weakly coupled regime for a wide range of model parameters. We give the value of Neff for MCP masses between ∼ 100 keV and 10 GeV and minicharges in the range 10−11−1. Our results can be used to constrain MCPs with the current data and they are also a valuable indicator for future experimental searches, should the hint for dark radiation manifest itself in the next release of Planck's data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e46f0c38565a329472dd61fa39c8ebaa0d755677

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Citations in the corpus

New physics in light of the H0 tension: An alternative view (2019, unknown): “[248–266] for examples of such models.”
Neutrino decoupling beyond the Standard Model: CMB constraints on the Dark Matter mass with a fast and precise Neff evaluation (2018, background): “The agreement between the observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) [1, 2], and the primordial element abundances [3, 4] with the SM prediction [5–15] of three relativistic neutrino species represents a success of the Standard Model, and constitues a non-trivial test for some of its exte”
The Dark Photon (2020, background): “The physics of stellar evolution for horizontal branches, red giants, and white dwarves (RGWD (Vogel and Redondo, 2014)),together with supernovae (SN1987 (Chang et al.”
Phases of new physics in the CMB (2015, background): “[22–30]) or from non-standard properties of the SM neutrinos (e.”
Refined bounds on MeV-scale thermal dark sectors from BBN and the CMB (2019, background): “Searches for light BSM species are not only carried out in terrestrial experiments, but a variety of astrophysical [71–76] and cosmological [77–84] constraints have been also derived on states with masses at the MeV scale.”
Direct detection of strongly interacting sub-GeV dark matter via electron recoils (2019, background): “ly small to avoid the production of dark photons at early times; for large values of the dark gauge coupling, the bounds would be given by the thin blue and green lines (“BBN N e ( )” and “CMB N e ”) [71]. – 24 – DarkSide-50 for fractional DM abundances of f ˜ = 0:4%, 10%, and 100%. The upper bounda”