Cosmological Constraints on Invisible Decay of Dark Matter

Abstract

The cold dark matter may be in a meta-stable state and decays to other particles with a very long lifetime. If the decaying products of the dark matter are weakly interacting, e.g. neutrinos, then it would have little impact on astrophysical processes and is therefore difficult to observe. However, such a decay would affect the expansion history of the Universe because of the change of the equation of state. We utilize a high-quality type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) data set selected from several resent observations and the position of the first peak of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) angular spectrum given by the WMAP three-year data to constrain the dark matter decay-to-neutrino rate $Γ=αΓ_χ$, where $α$ is the fraction of the rest mass which gets converted to neutrinos, and $Γ_χ$ is the decay width. We find that $Γ^{-1} > 0.7\times10^3$ Gyr at 95.5% confidence level.