Two-component millicharged dark matter and the EDGES 21 cm signal *

Constraining dark matter through 21 cm observations

Beyond reionization epoch cosmic hydrogen is neutral and can be directly observed through its 21 cm line signal. If dark matter (DM) decays or annihilates the corresponding energy input affects the hydrogen kinetic temperature and ionized fraction, and contributes to the Lyα background. The changes induced by these processes on the 21 cm signal can then be used to constrain the proposed DM cand...

The imprint of warm dark matter on the cosmological 21-cm signal

We investigate the effects of warm dark matter (WDM) on the cosmic 21-cm signal. If dark matter exists as WDM instead of cold dark matter (CDM), its non-negligible velocities can inhibit the formation of low-mass haloes that normally form first in CDM models, therefore delaying star formation. The absence of early sources delays the build-up of UV and X-ray backgrounds that affect the 21-cm rad...

Millicharged dark matter in quantum gravity and string theory.

We examine the millicharged dark matter scenario from a string theory perspective. In this scenario, kinetic and mass mixings of the photon with extra U(1) bosons are claimed to give rise to small electric charges, carried by dark matter particles, whose values are determined by continuous parameters of the theory. This seems to contradict folk theorems of quantum gravity that forbid the existe...

CMB and 21-cm signals for dark matter with a long-lived excited state

White Noise from Dark Matter: 21 cm Observations of Early Baryon Collapse

In concordance cosmology, dark matter density perturbations generated by inflation lead to nonlinear, virialized minihalos, into which baryons collapse at redshift z ∼ 20. We survey here novel baryon evolution produced by a modification of the power spectrum from white noise density perturbations at scales below k ∼ 10h Mpc (the smallest scales currently measured with the Lyman-α forest). Exoti...