Constraining decaying dark matter with BOSS data and the effective field theory of large-scale structures

Decaying Dark Matter and Lyman-$α$ forest constraints

“…It was found that the decay into purely DR will most likely not be able to solve cosmological tensions and requires minimum lifetimes of around ∼ 200 Gyrs for f = 1. The latest works [22,23] for this model confirm this even more while also providing tight constraints. For lifetimes shorter than the age of the universe, [22] finds f < 2.16% and for f → 1 a lower bound of τ > 250 Gyrs [22,23].…”

“…The latest works [22,23] for this model confirm this even more while also providing tight constraints. For lifetimes shorter than the age of the universe, [22] finds f < 2.16% and for f → 1 a lower bound of τ > 250 Gyrs [22,23]. As a further variant, also the decay of warm dark matter mother particles into massless dark radiation has been considered [24], but similar to the decay of CDM into massless daughters, this setup was found to neither solve the H 0 nor S 8 tensions [25].…”

“…Following [38,39], we therefore calculate the one-loop corrections from cosmological perturbation theory and use them as input in our analysis. As in [22], we resort to the conventional EdS approximation for computing non-linear kernels, while it would be interesting to take the exact time dependence for DCDM into account following e.g. the strategy developed in [43].…”

“…The decay into massless secondaries was investigated e.g. in [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], allowing also the possibility that only a fraction f of the dark matter decays. It was found that the decay into purely DR will most likely not be able to solve cosmological tensions and requires minimum lifetimes of around ∼ 200 Gyrs for f = 1.…”

“…This allows for a more in depth analysis, like in [32], where a mild preference for DCDM is found depending on the priors for S 8 . The latest work [22] also includes full-shape information from BOSS DR12 galaxy clustering, and finds that DCDM can ease the S 8 tension even though it is not performing significantly better than ΛCDM when disregarding KiDS data. However, when including KiDS, DCDM is preferred, and the best-fit model occurs for a lifetime of τ ∼ 120 Gyrs and ∼ 1.2%.…”