A detailed exploration of the EDGES 21 cm absorption anomaly and axion-induced cooling

Abstract

The EDGES collaboration's observation of an anomalously strong 21 cm absorption feature around the cosmic dawn era has energised the cosmological community by suggesting a novel signature of dark matter in the cooling of cosmic hydrogen. In a recent letter we have argued that by virtue of the ability to mediate cooling processes whilst in the condensed phase, a small amount of axion dark matter can explain these observations within the context of standard models of axions and axion-like particles. These axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) can thermalize through gravitational self-interactions and so eventually form a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), whereupon large-scale long-range correlation can produce experimentally observable signals such as these. In this context the EDGES best-fit result favours an axion-like-particle mass in the (6, 400) meV range. Future experiments and galaxy surveys, particularly the International Axion Observatory (IAXO) and EUCLID, should have the capability to directly test this scenario. In this paper, we will explore this mechanism in detail and give more thorough computational details of certain key points.

arXiv commentUpdated to match published version

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Lunar Orbit Measurement of Cosmic Dawn 21 cm Global Spectrum
• Detecting Cosmic 21 cm Global Signal Using an Improved Polynomial Fitting Algorithm
• Sensitivities on non-spinning and spinning primordial black hole dark matter with global 21 cm troughs
• Implications of the cosmological 21-cm absorption profile for high-redshift star formation and deep JWST surveys