2020/03/31 by John Coffey, Lindsay Forestell, David E. Morrissey +1 · 16 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Big Bang nucleosynthesis #Boson #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Dark photon #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Photon #Scalar field dark matter #Vector boson #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep07(2020)179
published in Journal of High Energy Physics 2020(7) (Springer Nature) · 36 pages 7 figures. Added citations and prepared for submission
openalex created_date 2020/03/13 · arxiv created 2020/04/22 · openalex publication_date 2020/07/01 · arxiv updated 2020/08/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
A bstract New dark vector bosons that couple very feebly to regular matter can be created in the early universe and decay after the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) or the formation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at recombination. The energy injected by such decays can alter the light element abundances or modify the power and frequency spectra of the CMB. In this work we study the constraints implied by these effects on a range of sub-GeV dark vectors including the kinetically mixed dark photon, and the B − L , L e − L μ , L e − L τ , and L μ − L τ dark U(1) bosons. We focus on the effects of electromagnetic energy injection, and we update previous investigations of dark photon and other dark vector decays by taking into account non-universality in the photon cascade spectrum relevant for BBN and the energy dependence of the ionization efficiency after recombination in our treatment of modifications to the CMB.