Cosmological constraints on the velocity-dependent baryon-dark matter coupling

Abstract

We present the cosmological constraints on the cross section of baryon-dark matter interactions for the dark matter mass below the MeV scale from the Planck CMB (cosmic microwave background) and SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) Lyman-$\alpha$ forest data. To explore the dark matter mass $m_{\chi}\lesssim 1$ MeV for which the dark matter's free-streaming effect can suppress the observable small scale density fluctuations, in addition to the acoustic oscillation damping in existence of the baryon-dark matter coupling, we apply the approximated treatment of dark matter free-streaming analogous to that of the conventional warm dark matter. We also demonstrate the mass dependence of the baryon-dark matter cross section bounds (for the dark matter mass down to $m_{\chi} \sim 5~{\rm keV}$), in contrast to the dark matter mass independence of the cross section constraints for the light dark matter below the MeV scale claimed in the previous literature.