2014/07/09 by Benjamin Audren, Julien Lesgourgues, Gianpiero Mangano +2 · 118 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold dark matter #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Gravitation #Hot dark matter #Inflation (cosmology) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Primordial black hole #Universe #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2014/12/028
published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2014(12), 028 (Institute of Physics) · 15 pages, 5 figures. Prepared for submission to JCAP
arxiv created 2014/07/09 · openalex publication_date 2014/12/11 · arxiv updated 2015/01/19 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Dark Matter is essential for structure formation in the late Universe so it must be stable on cosmological time scales. But how stable exactly? Only assuming decays into relativistic particles, we report an otherwise model independent bound on the lifetime of Dark Matter using current cosmological data. Since these decays affect only the low ℓ multipoles of the CMB, the Dark Matter lifetime is expected to correlate with the tensor-to-scalar ratio r as well as the curvature Ω k . We consider two models, including r and r +Ω k respectively, versus data from Planck, WMAP, WiggleZ and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, with or without the BICEP2 data (if interpreted in terms of primordial gravitational waves). This results in a lower bound on the lifetime of CDM given by 160 Gyr (without BICEP2) or 200 Gyr (with BICEP2) at 95% confidence level.