Physics Letters B 756 (2016) 212–215
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Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
CMB constraint on dark matter annihilation after Planck 2015
Masahiro Kawasaki
a,c
, Kazunori Nakayama
b,c,∗
, Toyokazu Sekiguchi
d
a
Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8568, Japan
b
Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 133-0033, Japan
c
Kavli IPMU (WPI), UTIAS, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8583, Japan
d
Institute for Basic Science, Center for Theoretical Physics of the Universe, Daejeon 34051, South Korea
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
18 January 2016
Received
in revised form 3 February 2016
Accepted
1 March 2016
Available
online 4 March 2016
Editor:
J. Hisano
We update the constraint on the dark matter annihilation cross section by using the recent measurements
of the CMB anisotropy by the Planck satellite. We fully calculate the cascade of dark matter annihilation
products and their effects on ionization, heating and excitation of the hydrogen, hence do not rely on any
assumption on the energy fractions that cause these effects.
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
Dark matter (DM) constitutes more than 20% of the present en-
ergy
density of the universe. Despite tremendous efforts to directly
or indirectly detect DM particles, we still do not know its parti-
cle
physics nature. However, recent developments in experiments
make constraints on DM properties severer, especially for the so-
called
weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP) DM.
In
the WIMP DM scenario, the DM particle has a self-annihi-
lation
cross section of the order of the weak scale, which can lead
to a right amount of DM relic abundance consistent with observa-
tions.
The “canonical” value of the self-annihilation cross section to
reproduce the observed amount of DM is
σ v3 × 10
−26
cm
3
s
−1
. (1)
One of the stringent constraints on the DM annihilation cross sec-
tion
comes from the gamma-ray observations of dwarf spheroidal
galaxies by the Fermi satellite [1]. The derived upper bound on the
cross section is actually close to the canonical value (1) for the
DM mass of ∼ 100 GeV depending on the final state of the anni-
hilation
products. Another constraint on the DM annihilation cross
section is obtained from the big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) [2–7],
which also gives stringent upper bound for the hadronic annihila-
tion
channel.
A
robust constraint on the DM annihilation cross section is also
obtained from the measurement of the cosmic microwave back-
ground
(CMB) anisotropy. DM annihilation around the recombina-
*
Corresponding author at: Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, The Univer-
sity
of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 133-0033, Japan.
E-mail
address: kazunori@hep-th.phys.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp (K. Nakayama).
tion epoch injects extra energy that contributes to ionization of
the neutral hydrogen and also to heating of them, hence it mod-
ifies
the standard recombination history [8–10]. Thus the precise
measurements of the CMB anisotropy have a high sensitivity to the
amount of extra energy injection around the recombination epoch,
which gives a robust constraint on the DM annihilation cross sec-
tion [11–31].
This constraint is robust in a sense that it does not
suffer from astrophysical uncertainties, such as DM density profile
in galaxies or clusters.
In
this letter we update constraints on the DM annihilation
cross section by using the newest data from the Planck satellite.
The Planck collaboration derived a constraint on the combination
of f
eff
σ v with a parameter f
eff
corresponding to energy fraction
that is absorbed by the gas [29]. Many past works just left f
eff
as a free parameter or used an approximation given in Ref. [9] in
terms of the ionization fraction of the hydrogen x
e
, which, how-
ever,
is not always justified.
1
We adopt the method developed in
our previous works [13,20] to calculate the cascade of DM an-
nihilation
products during/after the recombination, taking all the
energy losses, scatterings, ionizations and excitations into account
and their effects on the CMB anisotropy without relying on such
an approximation.
2. CMB constraint
Let us describe our method. We fully simulated how the back-
ground
plasma at a redshift z is affected for any initial injected
energy E at a higher redshift z
taking account of all the rele-
1
Refs. [30,31] extended the analysis of Planck [29] to accurately calculate the
effect of DM annihilation without such an approximation.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2016.03.005
0370-2693/
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.