Abstract
Light, weakly coupled dark sectors may be naturally decoupled in the early Universe and enter equilibrium with the Standard Model bath during the epoch of primordial nucleosynthesis. The equilibration and eventual decoupling of dark sector states modifies the expansion rate of the Universe, which alters the predicted abundances of the light elements. This effect can be encompassed in a time-varying contribution to , the effective number of neutrino species, such that during nucleosynthesis differs from its measured value at the time of recombination. We investigate the impact of such variations on the light element abundances with model-independent templates for the time dependence of as well as in specific models where a dark sector equilibrates with neutrinos or photons. We find that significant modifications of the expansion rate are consistent with the measured abundances of light nuclei, provided that they occur during specific periods of nucleosynthesis. In constraining concrete models, the relative importance of the cosmic microwave background and primordial nucleosynthesis is highly model dependent.
6 More- Received 16 April 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.015038
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society