General constraints on dark matter decay from the cosmic microwave background
Name
PhysRevD.95.023010.pdf
Size
1.34 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
dcbdb5f3b9e5ce590ee9050ab77c3162
Author(s)
Slatyer, Tracy Robyn
Wu, Chih-Liang
Date Issued
January 2017
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Slatyer, Tracy R., and Chih-Liang Wu. “General Constraints on Dark Matter Decay from the Cosmic Microwave Background.” Physical Review D 95.2 (2017): n. pag. © 2017 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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 parametrized 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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.023010
