Constraints on non-thermal Dark Matter from Planck lensing extraction

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that gravitational lensing of the CMB can be used to constrain the mass of sterile neutrino dark matter, providing an alternative to traditional methods with certain advantages.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of Planck CMB lensing data to set limits on sterile neutrino mass, accounting for cosmological parameter biases and non-linear effects.

Findings

Lower limit on sterile neutrino mass m_s > 2.08 keV at 95% CL

Lensing constraints are consistent with previous combined analyses

Weak lensing of CMB offers a valuable alternative for dark matter studies

Abstract

Distortions of CMB temperature and polarization anisotropy maps caused by gravitational lensing, observable with high angular resolution and sensitivity, can be used to constrain the sterile neutrino mass, offering several advantages against the analysis based on the combination of CMB, LSS and Ly\alpha forest power spectra. As the gravitational lensing effect depends on the matter distribution, no assumption on light-to-mass bias is required. In addition, unlike the galaxy clustering and Ly\alpha forest power spectra, the projected gravitational potential power spectrum probes a larger range of angular scales, the non-linear corrections being required only at very small scales. Taking into account the changes in the time-temperature relation of the primordial plasma and the modification of the neutrino thermal potential, we compute the projected gravitational potential power spectrum and its correlation with the temperature in the presence of DM sterile neutrino. We show that the cosmological parameters are generally not biased when DM sterile neutrino is included. From this analysis we found a lower limit on DM sterile neutrino mass m_s >2.08 keV at 95% CL, consistent with the lower mass limit obtained from the combined analysis of CMB, SDSS 3D power spectrum and SDSS Ly\alpha forest power spectrum ($m_{\nu_s}>1.7$ keV). We conclude that although the information that can be obtained from lensing extraction is rather limited due to the high level of the lensing noise of Planck experiment, weak lensing of CMB offers a valuable alternative to constrain the dark matter sterile neutrino mass.