TY - JOUR
T1 - Deciphering the archaeological record
T2 - Cosmological imprints of nonminimal dark sectors
AU - Dienes, Keith R.
AU - Huang, Fei
AU - Kost, Jeff
AU - Su, Shufang
AU - Thomas, Brooks
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank K. Boddy, D. Curtin, P. Draper, A. Erickcek, L. Leskovec, S. McDermott, C. Miller, Y. Park, M. Peloso, E. Rozo, G. Shiu, T. Tenkanen, K. Zurek, and especially J. Shelton and S. White for discussions. The research activities of K. R. D., F. H., and S. S. were supported in part by the Department of Energy under Grant DE-FG02-13ER41976 / DE-SC0009913, while those of J. K. were supported in part by the IBS under project code IBS-R018-D1 and those of B. T. were supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant PHY-1720430. The research activities of K. R. D. were also supported in part by the National Science Foundation through its employee IR/D program. This work was completed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant PHY-1607611. K. R. D. and B. T. would also like to acknowledge the hospitality of the Institute for Basic Science in Daejeon, South Korea, as well as the hospitality of the Institut Pascal at the Université Paris-Saclay, which is supported by the IPhT, the P2I and SPU research departments, and the P2IO Laboratory of Excellence (Programs ANR-11-IDEX-0003-01 Paris-Saclay and ANR-10-LABX-0038). The opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors, and do not represent any funding agencies.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 us. © 2020 American Physical Society. American Physical Society.
PY - 2020/6/15
Y1 - 2020/6/15
N2 - Many proposals for physics beyond the Standard Model give rise to a dark sector containing many degrees of freedom. In this work, we explore the cosmological implications of the nontrivial dynamics which may arise within such dark sectors, focusing on decay processes which take place entirely among the dark constituents. First, we demonstrate that such decays can leave dramatic imprints on the resulting dark-matter phase-space distribution. In particular, this distribution need not be thermal - it can even be multimodal, exhibiting a nontrivial pattern of peaks and troughs as a function of momentum. We then proceed to show how these features can induce modifications to the matter power spectrum. Finally, we assess the extent to which one can approach the archaeological "inverse" problem of deciphering the properties of an underlying dark sector from the matter power spectrum. Indeed, one of the main results of this paper is a remarkably simple conjectured analytic expression which permits the reconstruction of many of the important features of the dark-matter phase-space distribution directly from the matter power spectrum. Our results therefore provide an interesting toolbox of methods for learning about, and potentially constraining, the features of nonminimal dark sectors and their dynamics in the early universe.
AB - Many proposals for physics beyond the Standard Model give rise to a dark sector containing many degrees of freedom. In this work, we explore the cosmological implications of the nontrivial dynamics which may arise within such dark sectors, focusing on decay processes which take place entirely among the dark constituents. First, we demonstrate that such decays can leave dramatic imprints on the resulting dark-matter phase-space distribution. In particular, this distribution need not be thermal - it can even be multimodal, exhibiting a nontrivial pattern of peaks and troughs as a function of momentum. We then proceed to show how these features can induce modifications to the matter power spectrum. Finally, we assess the extent to which one can approach the archaeological "inverse" problem of deciphering the properties of an underlying dark sector from the matter power spectrum. Indeed, one of the main results of this paper is a remarkably simple conjectured analytic expression which permits the reconstruction of many of the important features of the dark-matter phase-space distribution directly from the matter power spectrum. Our results therefore provide an interesting toolbox of methods for learning about, and potentially constraining, the features of nonminimal dark sectors and their dynamics in the early universe.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.101.123511
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.101.123511
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85087409211
SN - 2470-0010
VL - 101
JO - Physical Review D
JF - Physical Review D
IS - 12
M1 - 123511
ER -