Rapid onset of the 21-cm signal suggests a preferred mass range for dark matter particle

2021/03/31 by Venno Vipp, A. Hektor, Andi Hektor +1 · 9 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Cold dark matter #Cosmology #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Galaxy #Hot dark matter #Light dark matter #Neutrino #Particle physics #Physics #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Redshift #Scalar field dark matter #Universe #Warm dark matter #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.103.123002

published in Physical review. D/Physical review. D. 103(12) (American Physical Society)

openalex created_date 2021/03/29 · openalex publication_date 2021/06/01 · arxiv created 2021/06/18 · arxiv updated 2021/06/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We are approaching a new era to probe the 21-cm neutral hydrogen signal from the period of cosmic dawn. This signal offers a unique window to the virgin Universe, e.g., to study dark matter models with different small-scale behaviors. The EDGES Collaboration recently published the first results of the global 21-cm spectrum. We demonstrate that such a signal can be used to set, unlike most observations concerning dark matter, both lower and upper limits for the mass of dark matter particles. We study the 21-cm signal resulting from a simple warm dark matter model with a sharp-k window function calibrated for high redshifts. We tie the PopIII star formation to Lyman-alpha and radio background production. Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo to sample the parameter space, we find that to match the EDGES signal, a warm dark matter particle must have a mass of 7.3_\ensuremath-3.3^+1.6 keV at 68% confidence interval. This translates to 2.2_\ensuremath-1.7^+1.4\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi10^\ensuremath-20 eV for fuzzy dark matter and 63_\ensuremath-35⁺¹⁹ keV for Dodelson-Widrow sterile neutrinos. Cold dark matter is unable to reproduce the signal due to its slow structure growth.

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