Joint CMB and BBN Constraints on Light Dark Sectors with Dark Radiation

Abstract

Dark sectors provide a compelling theoretical framework for thermally producing sub-GeV dark matter, and motivate an expansive new accelerator and direct-detection experimental program. We demonstrate the power of constraining such dark sectors using the measured effective number of neutrino species, $N_\text{eff}$, from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and primordial elemental abundances from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). As a concrete example, we consider a dark matter particle of arbitrary spin that interacts with the Standard Model via a massive dark photon, accounting for an arbitrary number of light degrees of freedom in the dark sector. We exclude dark matter masses below $\sim$ 4 MeV at 95% confidence for all dark matter spins and dark photon masses. These bounds hold regardless of additional new light, inert degrees of freedom in the dark sector, and for dark matter-electron scattering cross sections many orders of magnitude below current experimental constraints. The strength of these constraints will only continue to improve with future CMB experiments.