Cosmological constraints on decaying dark matter

Abstract

We present a complete analysis of the cosmological constraints on decaying dark matter. Previous analyses have used the cosmic microwave background and Type Ia supernova. We have updated them with the latest data as well as extended the analysis with the inclusion of Lyman-α forest, large scale structure and weak lensing observations. Astrophysical constraints are not considered in the present paper. The bounds on the lifetime of decaying dark matter are dominated by either the late-time integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect for the scenario with weak reionization, or CMB polarization observations when there is significant reionization. For the respective scenarios, the lifetimes for decaying dark matter are Γ−1 ≳ 100 Gyr and (fΓ)−1 ≳ 5.3 × 108 Gyr (at 95.4% confidence level), where the phenomenological parameter f is the fraction of the decay energy deposited in baryonic gas. This allows us to constrain particle physics models with dark matter candidates through investigation of dark matter decays into Standard Model particles via effective operators. For decaying dark matter of ∼ 100 GeV mass, we found that the size of the coupling constant in the effective dimension-4 operators responsible for dark matter decay has to generically be ≲ 10−22. We have also explored the implications of our analysis for representative models in theories of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking, minimal supergravity and little Higgs.