Constraining inhomogeneous energy injection from annihilating dark matter and primordial black holes with 21-cm cosmology

Abstract

The cosmic dawn 21-cm signal is a highly sensitive probe of any process which injects energy into the intergalactic medium, enabling novel searches for anomalous energy injection by through dark matter interactions. In addition to modifying the global 21-cm signal, these processes would leave distinct imprints on the frequency-resolved 21-cm power spectrum with a morphology jointly set by the time- and spatial-dependence of energy emission and absorption. In this work, we extend the DM21cm code package, which models the effects of spatially inhomogeneous energy emission and deposition on 21-cm cosmology, to study three well-motivated scenarios which 21-cm measurements are particularly well-suited to probe: dark matter annihilation through $p$-wave processes, the Hawking radiation of light primordial black holes, and energetic emission from accreting solar-mass primordial black holes. We project sensitivities to each of these scenarios, demonstrating that leading or near leading sensitivity to each can be achieved through 21-cm probes. We also make public our updates to the DM21cm code package that enable it to accommodate energy injection processes for general continuum spectra with arbitrary spatial and temporal dependence in an accompanying release.