Do you smell something decaying? Updated linear constraints on decaying dark matter scenarios

Abstract

Abstract The stability of particles in the cosmic soup is an important property that can affect the cosmic evolution. In this work, we update the constraints on the decaying cold dark matter scenario, when the decay products are effectively massless. We assume, as a base case, that all of dark matter is unstable and it can decay on cosmological time scales. We then extend the analysis to include the scenario where only a fraction of dark matter is unstable, while the remaining part is composed of the standard, stable, dark matter. We consider observations of cosmological probes at linear scales, i.e., Planck 2018 cosmic microwave background temperature, polarization, and lensing measurements, along with geometrical information from baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements from SDSS DR7, BOSS DR12, eBOSS DR16 and 6dFGS, to derive conservative constraints on the dark matter decay rate. We consider these dataset separately, to asses the relative constraining power of each dataset, as well as together to asses the joint constraints. We find the most stringent upper limit on the decay rate of decaying cold dark matter particles to be ΓDCDM < 0.129 × 10-18 s-1 (or, equivalently, the dark matter lifetime τ DCDM > 246 Gyr) at 95% C.L. for the combination of Planck primary anisotropies, lensing and BAO. We further explore one-parameter extensions of our baseline DCDM model. Namely, we vary the sum of neutrino masses, the curvature density parameter, and the tensor-to-scalar ratio along with the DCDM parameters. When varying the tensor-to-scalar ratio we also add data from the BICEP/Keck experiment.