Joint Cosmic Microwave Background and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Constraints on Light Dark Sectors with Dark Radiation

Giovanetti, Cara; Lisanti, Mariangela; Liu, Hongwan; Ruderman, Joshua T.

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.021302

Title: Joint Cosmic Microwave Background and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Constraints on Light Dark Sectors with Dark Radiation

Journal Article · Wed Jul 06 00:00:00 EDT 2022 · Physical Review Letters

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.021302· OSTI ID:1875010

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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, N_eff, 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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Research Organization:: Princeton Univ., NJ (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC); National Science Foundation (NSF)

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0007968; DGE1839302; PHY-1915409; PHY-1554858; PHY-1607611

OSTI ID:: 1875010

Alternate ID(s):: OSTI ID: 1980299

Journal Information:: Physical Review Letters, Journal Name: Physical Review Letters Vol. 129 Journal Issue: 2; ISSN 0031-9007

Publisher:: American Physical SocietyCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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