Cosmology of fermionic dark matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates a fermionic dark matter model, constraining particle mass and chemical potential using cosmological data, and examines its compatibility with large scale structure observations.

Contribution

It provides new bounds on fermionic dark matter particle mass and chemical potential based on BBN, WMAP, and large scale structure data.

Findings

Mass range constrained to 1.8 eV - 53 eV.

Chemical potential ratio can exceed unity.

Mass must be > 500 eV to fit Ly alpha forest data.

Abstract

We explore a model for a fermionic dark matter particle family which decouples from the rest of the partices when at least all standard model particles are in equilibrium. We calculate the allowed ranges for mass and chemical potential to be compatible with big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) calculations and WMAP-data for a flat universe with dark energy. Futhermore we estimate the free streaming length for fermions and antifermions to allow comparison to large scale structure data (LLS). We find that for dark matter decoupling when all standard model particles are present even the least restrictive combined BBN calculation and WMAP results allow us to constrain the initial dark matter chemical potential to a highest value of 6.3 times the dark matter temperature. In this case the resulting mass range is at most 1.8 eV < m < 53 eV, where the upper bound scales linearly with the effective degrees of freedom at decoupling. From LSS we find that similar to ordinary warm dark matter models the particle mass has to be larger than approximately 500 eV (meaning the effective degrees of freedom at decoupling have to be > 1000) to be compatible with observations of the Ly alpha forest at high redshift, but still the dark matter chemical potential over temperature ratio can exceed unity.