Cosmic Rays from Dark Matter Annihilation and Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dark matter annihilation during big-bang nucleosynthesis influences light element abundances, providing constraints on annihilating dark matter models based on cosmic-ray observations.

Contribution

It introduces constraints on annihilating dark matter scenarios from big-bang nucleosynthesis, especially for hadronic annihilation channels, based on recent cosmic-ray data.

Findings

Hadronic annihilation models face stringent constraints from light element abundances.

Leptonic annihilation models are less constrained by nucleosynthesis.

Dark matter annihilation can significantly alter primordial element abundances.

Abstract

Recent measurements of cosmic-ray electron and positron fluxes by PAMELA and ATIC experiments may indicate the existence of annihilating dark matter with large annihilation cross section. We show that the dark matter annihilation in the big-bang nucleosynthesis epoch affects the light element abundances, and it gives stringent constraints on such annihilating dark matter scenarios for the case of hadronic annihilation. Constraints on leptonically annihilating dark matter models are less severer.