Cosmic Microwave Background constraints of decaying dark matter particle properties

Abstract

If a component of cosmological dark matter is made up of massive particles - such as sterile neutrinos - that decay with cosmological lifetime to emit photons, the reionization history of the universe would be affected, and cosmic microwave background anisotropies can be used to constrain such a decaying particle model of dark matter. The optical depth depends rather sensitively on the decaying dark matter particle mass m_{dm}, lifetime tau_{dm}, and the mass fraction of cold dark matter f that they account for in this model. Assuming that there are no other sources of reionization and using the WMAP 7-year data, we find that 250 eV < m_{dm} < 1 MeV, whereas 2.23*10^3 yr < tau_{dm} < 1.23*10^18 yr. The best fit values for m_{dm} and tau_{dm}/f are 17.3 keV and 2.03*10^16 yr respectively.

17 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Can sterile neutrinos be the dark matter?
• Relic keV sterile neutrinos and reionization
• Contraints on radiative dark-matter decay from the cosmic microwave background
• Dark matter from late decays and the small-scale structure problems

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