Updated and Projected Cosmic Microwave Background Bounds on WIMP Annihilation

2025/12/11 by Myers, Charlotte, Agius, Dominic, Gaggero, Daniele +1
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.10896

Abstract

We derive updated Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) constraints on annihilating dark matter, and present forecasts for upcoming CMB surveys. We show that the addition of recent temperature, polarization, and lensing data from ground-based experiments yields only minor improvements (≈ 10%) compared to Planck bounds, confirming that the sensitivity remains dominated by the large-scale E-mode polarization. Forecasts, using a LiteBIRD-like setup, indicate that pairing a low-noise, wide-sky satellite at ℓ < 200 with high-resolution ground observations nearly saturates the cosmic-variance limit, improving bounds by ≈ 60%, where our derived 95th percentile limit is p_{\rm ann} < 1.27×10^-28 \mathrmcm³ s^-1 GeV^-1. We also consider the inclusion of B-mode polarization for a realistic future experiment.

Citations

• SPT-3G D1: CMB temperature and polarization power spectra and cosmology from 2019 and 2020 observations of the SPT-3G Main field
• CMB-S4 Science Book, First Edition

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