Tuesday, March 26, 2013

1303.6270 (Celine Boehm et al.)

A Lower Bound on the Mass of Cold Thermal Dark Matter from Planck    [PDF]

Celine Boehm, Matthew J. Dolan, Christopher McCabe
We show that the new measurement of the effective number of neutrinos Neff by the Planck experiment can be used to set a robust lower bound on the mass of cold thermal dark matter of O(MeV). Our limit applies if the dark matter remains in thermal equilibrium by coupling to electrons and photons or through interactions with neutrinos, and applies regardless of whether the dark matter annihilation cross-section is s-wave or p-wave. To illustrate our bounds we apply them to a model of a supersymmetric neutralino annihilating to neutrinos, via a light mixed left-right handed sneutrino mediator. While this scenario was not constrained by previous data the Planck limits on Neff allow us to set a lower bound on the neutralino dark matter mass of 5.5 MeV.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6270

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