Indirect dark matter signatures in the cosmic dark ages. I. Generalizing the bound on s-wave dark matter annihilation from Planck results

Abstract

Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies by Planck provide a sensitive probe of dark matter annihilation during the cosmic dark ages, and specifically constrain the annihilation parameter f[subscript eff]⟨σv⟩/m[subscript χ]. Using new results (paper II) for the ionization produced by particles injected at arbitrary energies, we calculate and provide f[subscript eff] values for photons and e[superscript +]e[superscript -] pairs injected at keV-TeV energies; the f[subscript eff] value for any dark matter model can be obtained straightforwardly by weighting these results by the spectrum of annihilation products. This result allows the sensitive and robust constraints on dark matter annihilation presented by the Planck collaboration to be applied to arbitrary dark matter models with s-wave annihilation. We demonstrate the validity of this approach using principal component analysis. As an example, we integrate over the spectrum of annihilation products for a range of Standard Model final states to determine the CMB bounds on these models as a function of dark matter mass, and demonstrate that the new limits generically exclude models proposed to explain the observed high-energy rise in the cosmic ray positron fraction. We make our results publicly available at http://nebel.rc.fas.harvard.edu/epsilon.