Probing sub-GeV dark matter-baryon scattering with cosmological observables

By W. Xu, C. Dvorkin, Andrew A. Chael. Physical Review D, 2018

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We derive new limits on the elastic scattering cross-section between baryons and dark matter using Cosmic Microwave Background data from the Planck satellite and measurements of the Lyman-alpha forest flux power spectrum from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Our analysis addresses generic cross sections of the form $\sigma \propto v^n$, where v is the dark matter-baryon relative velocity, allowing for constraints on the cross section independent of specific particle physics models. We include high-$\ell$ polarization data from Planck in our analysis, significantly improving results for $n\leq-2$ scenarios due to the direct influence of dark matter-baryon scattering on velocity perturbations. We apply a more careful treatment of dark matter thermal evolution than previously done, allowing us to extend our constraints down to dark matter masses of ~MeV. We show in this work that cosmological probes are complementary to current direct detection and astrophysical searches.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7d5bb8356ed8458f270b71646c8180c7f9c3c3c

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Citations in the corpus

Constraints on neutrinos and WDM Hints, neutrino bounds and WDM constraints from SDSS DR14 Lyman-$\alpha$ and Planck full-survey data (2019, methodology): “Since it extends the lever arm of other cosmological probes towards smaller scales, it has often been used to constraint the parameters of models affecting only the smallest scales – like warm dark matter (WDM) [1–4] or interacting dark matter [5–7] – or altering the global shape of the power spectr”
CMB-S4 Science Case, Reference Design, and Project Plan (2019, background): “[272] presented the first cosmological search for DM particles with any mass down to a keV (orders of magnitude below the mass thresholds of direct-detection experiments), and was followed by a number of related studies [273, 274].”
PICO: Probe of Inflation and Cosmic Origins (2019, methodology): “This effect has been used to search for evidence of dark-matter–proton scattering over a range of masses, couplings, and interaction models [55–62], to test the possibility of an interacting dark-matter sub-component [61], and to provide consistency tests of dark matter in the context of the anomalo”
Direct detection of strongly interacting sub-GeV dark matter via electron recoils (2019, methodology): “4, top left), we also show constraints from nuclear recoil DMsearches by XENON1T [93], CRESSTIII [94, 95], the CRESST 2017 surface run [96] as obtained in [53], and Migdal effect based bounds from EDELWEISS [46] and CDEX [97], together with constraints from the X-ray Quantum Calorimeter experiment (”
Refined bounds on MeV-scale thermal dark sectors from BBN and the CMB (2019, background): “[77] W.”
Constraints on Dark Matter Microphysics from the Milky Way Satellite Population (2019, methodology): “…in the cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) temperature and polarization power spectra from Planck (Boddy & Gluscevic 2018; Gluscevic & Boddy 2018; Xu et al. 2018) and the Lyman-α forest flux power spectrum from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; Dvorkin et al. 2014; Xu et al. 2018; Ooba et al.…”
The Simons Observatory: science goals and forecasts (2018, background): “…search for interactions of dark matter particles with masses down to 1 keV (Gluscevic and Boddy 2018; Boddy and Gluscevic 2018; Slatyer and Wu 2018; Xu et al. 2018) – far beyond the reach of current nuclear-recoil based experiments that are optimized to detect weakly interacting massive particles…”
Supernova 1987A constraints on sub-GeV dark sectors, millicharged particles, the QCD axion, and an axion-like particle (2018, background): “the DM has not decoupled from the SM at the time of the formation of the CMB [107, 108].”