Cosmology with mirror dark matter II: Cosmic Microwave Background and Large Scale Structure

Abstract

This is the second paper of a series devoted to the study of the cosmological implications of the existence of mirror dark matter. The parallel hidden mirror world has the same microphysics as the observable one and couples the latter only gravitationally. The primordial nucleosynthesis bounds demand that the mirror sector should have a smaller temperature T' than the ordinary one T, and by this reason its evolution can be substantially deviated from the standard cosmology. In this paper we took scalar adiabatic perturbations as the input in a flat Universe, and computed the power spectra for ordinary and mirror CMB and LSS, changing the cosmological parameters, and always comparing with the CDM case. We found differences in both the CMB and LSS power spectra, and we demonstrated that the LSS spectrum is particularly sensitive to the mirror parameters, due to the presence of both the oscillatory features of mirror baryons and the collisional mirror Silk damping. For x<0.3 the mirror baryon-photon decoupling happens before the matter-radiation equality, so that CMB and LSS power spectra in linear regime are equivalent for mirror and CDM cases. For higher x-values the LSS spectra strongly depend on the amount of mirror baryons. Finally, qualitatively comparing with the present observational limits on the CMB and LSS spectra, we show that for x<0.3 the entire dark matter could be made of mirror baryons, while in the case x>0.3 the pattern of the LSS power spectrum excludes the possibility of dark matter consisting entirely of mirror baryons, but they could present as admixture (up to 50%) to the conventional CDM.