TY - JOUR
T1 - Joint Cosmic Microwave Background and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Constraints on Light Dark Sectors with Dark Radiation
AU - Giovanetti, Cara
AU - Lisanti, Mariangela
AU - Liu, Hongwan
AU - Ruderman, Joshua T.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
PY - 2022/7/8
Y1 - 2022/7/8
N2 - Dark sectors provide a compelling theoretical framework for thermally producing sub-GeV dark matter, and motivate an expansive new accelerator and direct-detection experimental program. We demonstrate the power of constraining such dark sectors using the measured effective number of neutrino species, Neff, from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and primordial elemental abundances from big bang nucleosynthesis. As a concrete example, we consider a dark matter particle of arbitrary spin that interacts with the standard model via a massive dark photon, accounting for an arbitrary number of light degrees of freedom in the dark sector. We exclude dark matter masses below ∼4 MeV at 95% confidence for all dark matter spins and dark photon masses. These bounds hold regardless of additional new light, inert degrees of freedom in the dark sector, and for dark matter-electron scattering cross sections many orders of magnitude below current experimental constraints. The strength of these constraints will only continue to improve with future CMB experiments.
AB - Dark sectors provide a compelling theoretical framework for thermally producing sub-GeV dark matter, and motivate an expansive new accelerator and direct-detection experimental program. We demonstrate the power of constraining such dark sectors using the measured effective number of neutrino species, Neff, from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and primordial elemental abundances from big bang nucleosynthesis. As a concrete example, we consider a dark matter particle of arbitrary spin that interacts with the standard model via a massive dark photon, accounting for an arbitrary number of light degrees of freedom in the dark sector. We exclude dark matter masses below ∼4 MeV at 95% confidence for all dark matter spins and dark photon masses. These bounds hold regardless of additional new light, inert degrees of freedom in the dark sector, and for dark matter-electron scattering cross sections many orders of magnitude below current experimental constraints. The strength of these constraints will only continue to improve with future CMB experiments.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.021302
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.021302
M3 - Article
C2 - 35867453
AN - SCOPUS:85134497588
SN - 0031-9007
VL - 129
JO - Physical review letters
JF - Physical review letters
IS - 2
M1 - 021302
ER -