Lyman-$\alpha$ Constraints on Cosmic Heating from Dark Matter Annihilation and Decay
Hongwan Liu, Wenzer Qin, Gregory W. Ridgway, Tracy R. Slatyer
TL;DR
This paper establishes new limits on decaying and annihilating dark matter by ensuring their energy injection does not overheat the intergalactic medium, using advanced modeling to improve upon previous constraints.
Contribution
It introduces the use of the DarkHistory code to derive more robust and comprehensive constraints on dark matter models affecting the IGM temperature.
Findings
Constraints are competitive with existing limits on sub-GeV DM.
The analysis accounts for uncertainties in reionization processes.
Results are robust across various reionization scenarios.
Abstract
We derive new constraints on models of decaying and annihilating dark matter (DM) by requiring that the energy injected into the intergalactic medium (IGM) not overheat it at late times, when measurements of the Lyman- forest constrain the IGM temperature. We improve upon previous analyses by using the recently developed code package, which self-consistently takes into account additional photoionization and photoheating processes due to reionization and DM sources. Our constraints are robust to the uncertainties of reionization and competitive with leading limits on sub-GeV DM that decays preferentially to electrons.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.