Long lived inert Higgs in fast expanding universe and its imprint on cosmic microwave background

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a long-lived inert scalar decaying in a fast expanding universe can alter the effective neutrino degrees of freedom, impacting cosmic microwave background measurements and providing insights into feebly interacting dark matter.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scenario with a long-lived inert scalar in a non-standard cosmology, linking late decay effects to dark matter and neutrino sector observations.

Findings

Late decay of inert scalar increases ΔN_eff in non-standard cosmology.

The model predicts correlations between dark matter properties and ΔN_eff.

Potential detectability of effects with current and future CMB experiments.

Abstract

Presence of any extra radiation energy density at the time of cosmic microwave background formation can significantly impact the measurement of the effective relativistic neutrino degrees of freedom or ${\rm \Delta N_{eff}}$ which is very precisely measured by the Planck collaboration. Here, we propose a scenario where a long lived inert scalar, which is very weakly coupled to dark sector, decays to a fermion dark matter via freeze-in mechanism plus standard model neutrinos at very low temperature $(T< T_{\rm BBN})$. We explore this model in the fast expanding universe, where it is assumed that the early epoch $(T > T_{\rm BBN})$ of the universe is dominated by a non-standard species $\Phi$ instead of the standard radiation. In this non-standard cosmological picture, such late time decay of the inert scalar can inject some entropy to the neutrino sector after it decouples from the thermal bath and this will make substantial contribution to ${\rm \Delta{N_{eff}}}$. Besides, in this scenario, the new contribution to $\Delta N_{\rm eff}$ is highly correlated with the dark matter sector. Thus, one can explore such feebly interacting dark matter particles (FIMP) by the precise measurement of $\Delta N_{\rm eff}$ using the current (Planck2018) and forthcoming (CMB-S4 \& SPT3G) experiments.