Rapid onset of the 21-cm signal suggests a preferred mass range for dark matter particle

Abstract

We are approaching a new era to probe the 21-cm neutral hydrogen signal from the period of cosmic dawn. This signal offers a unique window to the virgin Universe, e.g., to study dark matter models with different small-scale behaviours. The EDGES collaboration has recently published the first results of the global 21-cm spectrum. We demonstrate that such a signal can be used to set, unlike most observations concerning dark matter, both lower and upper limits for the mass of dark matter particles. We study the 21-cm signal resulting from a simple warm dark matter model with a sharp-$k$ window function calibrated for high redshifts. We tie the PopIII star formation to Lyman-alpha and radio background production. Using MCMC to sample the parameter space we find that to match the EDGES signal, a warm dark matter particle must have a mass of $7.3_{-3.3}^{+1.6}$ keV at 68\% confidence interval. This translates to $2.2_{-1.7}^{+1.4}\times 10^{-20}$ eV for fuzzy dark matter and $63_{-35}^{+19}$ keV for Dodelson-Widrow sterile neutrinos. Cold dark matter is unable to reproduce the signal due to its slow structure growth.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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