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arXiv · 1803.09398

The impact of EDGES 21-cm data on dark matter interactions

Kingman Cheung·Jui-Lin Kuo·Kin-Wang Ng·Yue-Lin Sming Tsai
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Abstract

The recently announced results on the 21-cm absorption spectrum by the EDGES experiment can place very stringent limits on dark matter annihilation cross-sections. We properly take into account the heating energy released from dark matter annihilation from the radiation epoch to the 21-cm observation redshifts in the radiative transfer to compute the evolution of the gas temperature. Our results show that the global 21-cm absorption profile is a powerful cosmological probe of the dark matter interactions. For dark matter annihilating into electron-positron pairs, the EDGES results give a more stringent upper limit than the PLANCK result on the annihilation cross section at the lower dark matter mass region.

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Kingman Cheung, Jui-Lin Kuo, Kin-Wang Ng, Yue-Lin Sming Tsai. 2018-11-12. The impact of EDGES 21-cm data on dark matter interactions. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2018.11.058

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