Variation of the baryon-to-photon ratio due to decay of dark matter particles

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dark matter particle decay can alter the baryon-to-photon ratio over cosmological timescales, providing constraints from gamma-ray background data and implications for future observations.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of dark matter decay effects on baryon-to-photon ratio variations and derives observational constraints using gamma-ray background data.

Findings

Dark matter decay can cause baryon-to-photon ratio changes up to 1.

Gamma-ray background data constrains ratio variation to less than 10^{-5}.

Future experiments could detect these variations to study dark matter properties.

Abstract

The influence of dark matter particle decay on the baryon-to-photon ratio has been studied for different cosmological epochs. We consider different parameter values of dark matter particles such as mass, lifetime, the relative fraction of dark matter particles. It is shown that the modern value of the dark matter density $\Omega_{\rm CDM}=0.26$ is enough to lead to variation of the baryon-to-photon ratio up to $\Delta \eta / \eta \sim 0.01 \div 1$ for decays of the particles with masses 10 GeV $\div$ 1 TeV. However, such processes can also be accompanied by emergence of an excessive gamma ray flux. The observational data on the diffuse gamma ray background are used to making constraints on the dark matter decay models and on the maximum possible variation of the baryon-to-photon ratio $\Delta\eta/\eta\lesssim10^{-5}$. Detection of such variation of the baryon density in future cosmological experiments can serve as a powerful means of studying properties of dark matter particles.