No Arabic abstract
Dark matter interactions with electrons or protons during the early Universe leave imprints on the cosmic microwave background and the matter power spectrum, and can be probed through cosmological and astrophysical observations. We explore these interactions using a diverse suite of data: cosmic microwave background anisotropies, baryon acoustic oscillations, the Lyman-$alpha$ forest, and the abundance of Milky-Way subhalos. We derive constraints using model-independent parameterizations of the dark matter--electron and dark matter--proton interaction cross sections and map these constraints onto concrete dark matter models. Our constraints are complementary to other probes of dark matter interactions with ordinary matter, such as direct detection, big bang nucleosynthesis, various astrophysical systems, and accelerator-based experiments.
We revise the cosmological phenomenology of Macroscopic Dark Matter (MDM) candidates, also commonly dubbed as Macros. A possible signature of MDM is the capture of baryons from the cosmological plasma in the pre-recombination epoch, with the consequent injection of high-energy photons in the baryon-photon plasma. By keeping a phenomenological approach, we consider two broad classes of MDM in which Macros are composed either of ordinary matter or antimatter. In both scenarios, we also analyze the impact of a non-vanishing electric charge carried by Macros. We derive constraints on the Macro parameter space from three cosmological processes: the change in the baryon density between the end of the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) decoupling, the production of spectral distortions in the CMB and the kinetic coupling between charged MDM and baryons at the time of recombination. In the case of neutral Macros we find that the tightest constraints are set by the baryon density condition in most of the parameter space. For Macros composed of ordinary matter and with binding energy $I$, this leads to the following bound on the reduced cross-section: $sigma_X/M_X lesssim 6.8 cdot 10^{-7} left(I/mathrm{MeV}right)^{-1.56} , text{cm}^2 , text{g}^{-1}$. Charged Macros with surface potential $V_X$, instead, are mainly constrained by the tight coupling with baryons, resulting in $sigma_X/M_X lesssim 2 cdot 10^{-11} left(|V_X|/mathrm{MeV}right)^{-2} text{cm}^2 , text{g}^{-1}$. Finally, we show that future CMB spectral distortions experiments, like PIXIE and SuperPIXIE, would have the sensitivity to probe larger regions of the parameter space: this would allow either for a possible evidence or for an improvement of the current bounds on Macros as dark matter candidates.
The increasingly significant tensions within $Lambda$CDM, combined with the lack of detection of dark matter (DM) in laboratory experiments, have boosted interest in non-minimal dark sectors, which are theoretically well-motivated and inspire new search strategies for DM. Here we consider, for the first time, the possibility of DM having simultaneous interactions with photons, baryons, and dark radiation (DR). We have developed a new and efficient version of the Boltzmann code CLASS that allows for one DM species to have multiple interaction channels. With this framework we reassess existing cosmological bounds on the various interaction coefficients in multi-interacting DM scenarios. We find no clear degeneracies between these different interactions and show that their cosmological effects are largely additive. We further investigate the possibility of these models to alleviate the cosmological tensions, and find that the combination of DM-photon and DM-DR interactions can at the same time reduce the $S_8$ tension (from $2.3sigma$ to $1.2sigma$) and the $H_0$ tension (from $4.3sigma$ to $3.1sigma$). The public release of our code will pave the way for the study of various rich dark sectors.
This paper aims to put constraints on the parameters of the Scalar Field Dark Matter (SFDM) model, when dark matter is described by a free real scalar field filling the whole Universe, plus a cosmological constant term. By using a compilation of 51 $H(z)$ data and 1048 Supernovae data from Panteon, a lower limit for the mass of the scalar field was obtained, $m geq 5.1times 10^{-34} $eV and $H_0=69.5^{+2.0}_{-2.1}text{ km s}^{-1}text{Mpc}^{-1}$. Also, the present dark matter density parameter was obtained as $Omega_phi = 0.230^{+0.033}_{-0.031}$ at $2sigma$ confidence level. The results are in good agreement to standard model of cosmology, showing that SFDM model is viable in describing the dark matter content of the universe.
We present new observational constraints on the elastic scattering of dark matter with electrons for dark matter masses between 10 keV and 1 TeV. We consider scenarios in which the momentum-transfer cross section has a power-law dependence on the relative particle velocity, with a power-law index $n in {-4,-2,0,2,4,6}$. We search for evidence of dark matter scattering through its suppression of structure formation. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background temperature, polarization, and lensing anisotropy from textit{Planck} 2018 data and of the Milky Way satellite abundance measurements from the Dark Energy Survey and Pan-STARRS1 show no evidence of interactions. We use these data sets to obtain upper limits on the scattering cross section, comparing them with exclusion bounds from electronic recoil data in direct detection experiments. Our results provide the strongest bounds available for dark matter--electron scattering derived from the distribution of matter in the Universe, extending down to sub-MeV dark matter masses, where current direct detection experiments lose sensitivity.
We study a two-parameter extension of the cosmological standard model $Lambda$CDM in which cold dark matter interacts with a new form of dark radiation. The two parameters correspond to the energy density in the dark radiation fluid $Delta N_mathrm{fluid}$ and the interaction strength between dark matter and dark radiation. The interactions give rise to a very weak dark matter drag which damps the growth of matter density perturbations throughout radiation domination, allowing to reconcile the tension between predictions of large scale structure from the CMB and direct measurements of $sigma_8$. We perform a precision fit to Planck CMB data, BAO, large scale structure, and direct measurements of the expansion rate of the universe today. Our model lowers the $chi$-squared relative to $Lambda$CDM by about 12, corresponding to a preference for non-zero dark matter drag by more than $3 sigma$. Particle physics models which naturally produce a dark matter drag of the required form include the recently proposed non-Abelian dark matter model in which the dark radiation corresponds to massless dark gluons.