2009/04/30 by S. Galli, Fabio Iocco, F. Iocco +3 · 8 citations
Chemistry · Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Annihilation #Astrophysics #CMB cold spot #Chemistry #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Planck #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Quantum mechanics #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.80.023505
published as Phys.Rev.D80:023505,2009
arxiv created 2009/04/30 · openalex publication_date 2009/07/08 · arxiv updated 2010/04/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The injection of secondary particles produced by dark matter (DM) annihilation around redshift \ensuremath∼1000 would inevitably affect the process of recombination, leaving an imprint on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and polarization. We show that the most recent CMB measurements provided by the WMAP satellite mission place interesting constraints on DM self-annihilation rates, especially for models that exhibit a large Sommerfeld enhancement of the annihilation cross section, as recently proposed to fit the PAMELA and ATIC results. Furthermore, we argue that upcoming CMB experiments such as Planck, will improve the constraints by at least 1 order of magnitude, thus providing a sensitive probe of the properties of DM particles.