Decaying dark matter and the CMB and LSS power spectrum

Ran Huo
March 16, 2010
Abstract
Gravitino as dark matter is usually overproduced after reheating in leptogenesis,
especially in gauge mediated susy breaking where it is the LSP. Yanagida [1] have
proposed a way to introduce a still lighter susy particle, say axino, and the gravitino
eventually decay to axino to avoid overclosure. However, it failed to consider the
impact it brings to large scale structure. We modied the open code cmbfast, and
performed calculations for CMB angular power spectrum and transfer functions. Our
results should apply to any models with relatively late dark matter decay, with two
collisionless produced particles.
1 Motivation
Gravitino is a promising SuperWIMP candidate for dark matter. In gauge mediated susy
breaking, gravitino is usually the LSP and the mass has a large available region below
TeV scale. In fact the mass of gravitino is m3
2
=
<F>

3M
P
, while M
P
= (8G
N
)

1
2
=
2.4 10
18
GeV is the reduced Planck mass and F is the supersymmetry-breaking scale
squared; compared to the soft susy breaking mass scale m
soft

F
S
, usually taken as TeV
scale, and S is the messenger scale. So m3
2

S
M
P
m
soft
and it can be several orders lower
than the mass of susy particle.
Gravitino can be produced in many ways. In literature gravitino is widely considered
to be produced as the decay product of other susy particle, especially the NLSP. However,
the way of direct thermal production may also be important, or in some cases disastrous.
Because it is so weakly coupled to other particles, even in the very early stage of the uni-
verse when the temperature is extremely high, namely during the reheating after ination,
it is still very dicult for gravitino to get thermal equilibrium. Exception exists that if
the mass of gravitino is below several tens of eV, the goldstino component of gravitino will
be signicant and the interaction is enhanced, gravitino may achieve thermal equilibrium
in a T
R
= 10
10
GeV reheating temperature. However, apparently there is still a large
parameter window that the non-equilibrium thermal production applies.
A high reheating temperature of, say 10
10
GeV, is usually required for leptogenesis. The
reheating temperature should be higher than the mass of the lightest right hand Majorana
neutrino, which is determined by see-saw mechanism to be roughly that order, for the right
hand neutrino to be at some sizable equilibrium abundance and the the observed matter
anti-matter asymmetry is created through a small CP-violation. Then several calculation
1
[2] [3] shows that gravitino is easily overproduced in this scenario
Y3
2
1.4 10
10
_
T
R
10
10
GeV
__
100GeV
m3
2
_
2
_
m
g
()
1TeV
_
3
, (1)
3
2
h
2
0.28
_
T
R
10
10
GeV
__
100GeV
m3
2
__
m
g
()
1TeV
_
3
. (2)
where m
g
() is the mass of the gluino at scale , where 100GeV. Given an O(GeV)
or O(MeV) gravitino mass the 3
2
h
2
will be many orders larger than the observed CDM
contribution
CDM
h
2
0.105, or even the overclosure condition. This is the gravitino
problem in leptogenesis.
One way to avoid this problem is to lower the reheating temperature. For leptogenesis
to still produce the observed matter anti-matter asymmetry, we require a much enhanced
CP-violation for Majorana neutrino decay. This can be achieved in a similar way as the
resonant decay of the K
0

K
0
system, where the near degeneracy of two mass eigenstates
mixed together to enhance the CP-violation. This way is sorted as resonant leptogenesis
[4]. However, this requires a near degeneracy of the Majorana neutrino mass, which are
naturally hierarchy. One should introduce additional symmetry like A
4
to achieve this.
In this sense it seems that ordinary leptogenesis is directly conicted with gauge medi-
ated susy breaking, in the cross of gravitino problem. Is there a way to remedy? Yanagida
[1] proposed a way that the gravitino is actually not the LSP, but there still is some other
lighter susy particles. As the super partner of axion in strong CP problem, axino has a
very model dependent mass and in some models it can have a mass still lower than the
mass of gravitino. Then gravitino nally decays to axion and axino g a + a, they
are both collisionless so that the BBN constraint does not apply. The gravitino density
is reduced by the mass ratio of axino and gravitino, which is taken to be like O(keV)
axino mass to O(100GeV) gravitino mass, so the density is reduced by 8 orders and the
overclosure problem is avoided.
However, [1] failed to consider the impact of the decay to structure formation. Because
of the suppression of Planck scale for interaction, the decay is characterized by a large life
time, say O(10
9
s). It is not too far before the epoch of structure formation. The produced
axino and axion is relativistic and there is no time for them to cool down by redshift. It
behaves like hot dark matter and the structure will be spoiled.
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) forms as the decoupling of relic photon, it is
the best observed imprint for early universe. it happens at around O(10
13
s) in standard
cosmology, so we expect the hypothetical gravitino decay will be seen from CMB. We
modied the open code cmbfast to calculate the eect. We generalize it to universal
scenario. The cmb power spectrum can directly be compared to
Here we want to point out that our dark matter decay calculation also applies to
other physical scenario. If gravitino is really the LSP, and we dont consider the thermal
overproduction but just the scenario that other susy particles like sneutrino decay to it,
we have a similar eect [5]. Or if the gravitino is the LSP but the R parity is slightly
broken, gravitino will eventually decay to ordinary particle (but should be collisionless
and a large number of photon is not allowed). All the decay widths are suppressed by the
Planck scale squared and the decay life times are relatively large.
In section 2 we will briey go through our physical picture of gravitino decay. In section
3 we introduce the cmbfast code itself and our modication without details. Section 4 and
5 contain sample of our calculations. In section 6 we conclude.
2
2 Axino and Gravitino
We work in KSVZ axion model. Axion is the Nambu-Goldstone boson for the Peccei-Quinn
symmetry, with a mass estimation of m
a

f

f
PQ
. In supersymmetric models the axion
will have a super partner, the axino. Axion is CP odd, it also has a CP even partner, called
saxion , with largely unknown mass. So the super multiplet is = +ia+

2 a+
2
F

.
However, saxion is unrelated to the interaction.
When axion is referred in the literature of dark matter, it is through coherent pro-
duction of vacua misalignment. It is produced at the long-wave state, so although it is
extremely light, it is still cold. However, if we treat the decay produced axino as all dark
matter, we dont have a signicant contribution of axion to the cold dark matter. We as-
sume some mechanism that prevents a large v.e.v of angle, so the coherent production is
negligible. Note that the current upper bound of PQ scale f
PQ
10
12
GeV comes from the
requirement that the axion does not to exceed the dark matter density with an arbitrary
angle v.e.v, if angle v.e.v is ne tuned to zero this upper bound is invalidated.
For axino, there are two production ways. One is from thermal production in the
reheating, the other is the late time decay production from gravitino. We will omit the
direct decay of other susy particles (except gravitino) to axino, which may have a dierent
life time, because other susy particles are supposed to be much less than the dominant
gravitino.
In our real calculation through modied cmbfast we will use arbitrary parameter of
decaying dark matter and nondecay dark matter.
Finally the decay time for gravitino is
T
D
=
192M
2
p
m
3
3
2
_
1
m
2
a
m
2
3
2
_
4
2.35 10
9
_
100GeV
m3
2
_
3
_
1
m
2
a
m
2
3
2
_
4
s. (3)
3 Modied cmbfast with decay
3.1 Original code
Cmbfast [6] is based on worldline integration of photon, instead of solving Boltzmann
equation explicitly. It works in synchronous gauge. The eective Boltzmann equation for
photon in synchronous gauge is

T
+ ik
T
=
2
k
2
+
_

T0
+ v
1
2
P
2
()(
T2
+
P0
+
P2
)

. (4)
Where
T
(

k, n) =
T(

k, n)

T
is the observation temperature uctuation. Overdot means
derivative to conformal time .

k is the perturbation wave number, n is the light of sight
direction of the observer and =

k n. = an
e
x
e

T
is the dierential optical depth,
where a is the scale factor normalized to unity today, n
e
is the electron number density (in
coordinate space), x
e
is the electron ionization fraction,
T
is the Thomson cross section.


h+6
2k
2
and h and are two gauge perturbation modes of spatial part of FRW metric
in synchronous gauge. The subindex 0 or 2 of the last several terms are multipole index,
T or P denotes dierent Stokes parameters.
Formally we can integrate it out till present
0

T
(

k, n) =
_

0
0
de
ik(
0
)
e
(
0
)
_
(
2
k
2
)+
_

T0
+v
1
2
P
2
()(
T2
+
P0
+
P2
)

_
.
(5)
3
Then we expand it in spherical harmonic functions

T
(

k, n) =

(i)

(2 + 1)P

()
T
(k),

T
(

k) =
_

0
0
dj

(k
0
k)
_
e

( + ) + e

_
1
4

0
+ +
1
k
2

b
+
1
16
+
3
16k
2

_
+
d
d
(e

)
_
+
1
k
2

b
+
3
8k
2

_
+
d
2
d
2
(e

)
3
16k
2

_
,
after some manipulation. Here j

is the spherical Bessel function,

and 4 for
photon is the quantity directly calculated in code. = 4(
T2
+
P0
+
P2
). Finally the
usually measured angular anisotropy is
C

=
_

0
d ln k
2
T
(k), (6)
and the plot is usually in T
2
CMB
( + 1)
C

2
.
The detailed calculation of the quantity in integration depends on the evolution of all
particle species and metric perturbation h and . Baryon photon plasma is directly related
to CMB, but other species like cold dark matter, massless and massive neutrino are also
important because they talk in gravity. For a review, see [7]. Here we just take massive
neutrinos for example, the evolution equations of perturbation are

0
=
qk

1
+
1
6

h
d ln f
d ln q
(7)

1
=
qk

2
3

2
_
(8)

2
=
qk

_
2
5

3
5

3
_

_
1
15

h +
2
5

_
d ln f
d ln q
(9)

=
qk

1
2 + 1
_

1
( + 1)
+1
_
3 (10)

=
qk

1
+
+ 1

As Truncation (11)
where is the fractional perturbation to equilibrium distribution f + f = f(1 + ) =
1
e
E/T
+1
(1 + ).
In the way of perturbation growth cmbfast also calculate the transfer function for
dierent species of cold dark matter, baryon, photon and neutrino. Transfer function is
by denition the ratio of perturbation growth factor from an very early stage to certain
later stage, between certain interesting scale and very large scale which is outside horizon
in the whole evolution
T(k)
(k, t
f
)
(k, t
i
)
(k = 0, t
f
)
(k = 0, t
i
)
(12)
Sky survey provide some large scale structure information, in the form of spatial power
spectrum P(k). It is related to dimensionless perturbation by

2
(k) =
8k
3

2
P(k) (13)
4
3.2 Our modication
We introduced free parameter of
d
to be the decay produced energy density today, while
still keeping
c
. That means we can treat any combination of decaying and nondecay dark
matter. For decaying dark matter, we introduced the mass ratio
m
d1
m
o
and
m
d2
m
o
where m
d1
and m
d2
are separately the masses of two daughter particles and m
o
is the mass of parent
particle. No exact mass scale is needed here, what matters is only the ratio. Essentially
they are free parameters
1
, and massless case will be covered by setting one to zero. The
last free parameter is the decay time T
d
.
Before decay the parent particle is taken to be at rest, so for a two body decay the
transverse momentum p is xed. After decay, the comoving momentum q = ap is conserved
in expansion for collisionless particle. We discretize the produced particles into like 30
channels, each channel corresponds to particles which are produced around certain scale
factor, or equivalently, having certain comoving momentum q. Then perturbation for each
channel evolvers in a way like (7), the only dierence is that the unperturbed distribution
is now decay distribution. A fraction of d is distributed into q space d
3
q = 4q
2
dq =
4p
3
a
2
da, so partition function from decay is
f
dn
d
3
q
=
Ce

t
T
d
dt
T
d
4p
3
a
2
da
=
Ce

t
T
d
T
d
p
3
a a
(14)
And the quantity of
d ln f
d ln q
in (7) can be calculated as
d ln f
d ln q
=
1
T
d
a
a
2

3
2
+
3 p
2
(15)
The evolution mode for each channel is determined uniquely by its velocity at arbitrary
scale factor, independent of whether it is really lled with decay produced particles. The
initial condition for each channel is set at a very early stage with a very small scale factor
(a = 10
8
), in the same way massive neutrino.
Right now we have only completed the modication for at universe (
k
= 0) sector,
and only for scalar mode (not for tensor mode), but it suce for our purpose. The
modication has not been extensively tested for its accuracy.
4 CMB Calculations
The best t cosmological parameter set that we are using for ducial is
b
= 0.046,

c
= 0.224,
v
= 0.73,
n
= 0 for massive neutrino, H
0
= 71km/s/Mpc, T
CMB
= 2.725K,
n

= 3.04 for massless neutrino, and eective massless d.o.f is 10.75 after BBN. Our No
decay case always refer to this, without decay eect.
The eect of decay is always to introduce some lighter particles, they will behave in a
way somehow like radiation, depends on the exact mass ratio, so that the velocity. Rela-
tivistic energy density during recombination will contribute to T
0
i
terms and T
i
j
terms,
while cold dark matters contribution will be suppressed because they are proportional to
v or v
2
. Then the metric term in (5) will give a lifted peak. A similar eect is known for
less cold dark matter in literature, which also has a smaller mass to radiation ratio.
1
Some small error may exist relating to the initial conditions. And usually for the second particle we
calculate higher component, so its better to use the second one as massless, where higher multipole are
not suppressed by velocity.
5
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
T
0
2

l
(
l
+
1
)
/
2

i
n


(

K
)
2
l
WMAP 7 year data
ACBAR data
BOOMERANG data
CBI data
No decay
25% decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
50% decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
75% decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
Figure 1: CMB calculation. Varying the fraction of DM from decay, with a total
c
+
d
=
0.224. In following gures all decay means the same.
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
T
0
2

l
(
l
+
1
)
/
2

i
n


(

K
)
2
l
WMAP 7 year data
ACBAR data
BOOMERANG data
CBI data
No decay
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
7
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
8
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
10
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
11
Figure 2: CMB calculation. Varying the life time. As decay time goes smaller, it ap-
proaches the non decay case. On the other hand, Larger decay time gives more relativistic
energy density during recombination, because there are less time for it to get redshifted,
so the peak is further lifted.
6
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
T
0
2

l
(
l
+
1
)
/
2

i
n


(

K
)
2
l
WMAP 7 year data
ACBAR data
BOOMERANG data
CBI data
No decay
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.9, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.3, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.05, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.03, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.02, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
all decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.01, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
Figure 3: CMB calculation. Varying the mass ratio. We x the decay produced energy
density to be
d
= 0.224 today, so small mass ratio means more relativistic energy density
right after decay and higher peaks.
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
T
0
2

l
(
l
+
1
)
/
2

i
n


(

K
)
2
l
WMAP 7 year data
ACBAR data
BOOMERANG data
CBI data
No decay
10
-5
decay, m
d1
/m
o
=10
-5
, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
3*10
-5
decay, m
d1
/m
o
=10
-5
, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
10
-4
decay, m
d1
/m
o
=10
-5
, m
d2
/m
o
=0, t
d
=10
9
Figure 4: CMB calculation. A tiny
d
with a similarly hierarchial mass ratio, and
c
=
0.224. We have checked that even for this small mass ratio the produced massive particle
energy density today is nearly all from mass, so the two tiny ratio combines an order one
contribution to before decay. Actually it corrects the relativistic energy by O(10
1
),
and it is still discernible from CMB spectrum.
7
1e-007
1e-006
1e-005
0.0001
0.001
0.01
0.1
1
0.001 0.01 0.1 1 10 Small
T
r
a
n
s
f
e
r

F
u
n
c
t
i
o
n
k in h/Mpc
SDSS data
No decay
25% decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
9
50% decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
9
75% decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
9
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
9
Figure 5: CDM Transfer function calculation. Varying the fraction of DM from decay,
with a total
c
+
d
= 0.224. We set the second decay product to be massless in all cases.
We can see that CMB is able to trace relativistic energy density. If there is a sizable
additional relativistic energy density from decay, although it is very small today by red-
shift, it still imprint on the CMB spectrum. On the other hand, it is not so sensitive to
matter, a near degenerate decay is relatively hard to tell from mere CMB data.
5 Transfer Function Calculations
A similar modication is [8], but it only calculate the transfer function. We found a match
in transfer function calculation, given that the decay time O(10
7
)s and
m
d1
m
o
0.5,
m
d2
m
o
0.
We do transfer function for cold dark matter. On small scales the perturbation will be
oscillating, so there may be several calculated wave number points with minus perturbation
value, and we dont get continuous t line. Thats more severe for baryon, so although
baryon trace the measured spatial power spectrum better than cold dark matter, we plot
for cold dark matter.
Transfer function, or the spatial power spectrum, is complementary to CMB analysis.
It tells sensitively on the matter, even on decay with close mass between parent particle
and daughter particle, given that a signicant part of dark matter comes from decay. It
have less power in telling the radiation. Another drawback is that the spatial spectrum is
not so well measured compared with CMB.
6 Conclusion and Outlook
With our calculation we can see that the hierarchy late decaying dark matter scenario
is impossible, which is represented by gravitino decaying into axino in our case. If the
gravitino is part of dark matter, it should either be stable, then we still have the gravitino
over production problem; or whatever decay is between near degenerate mass states, then
it doesnt help to solve the gravitino problem; or decay happens at very early stage of the
universe, but it seems unlikely because of the Planck scale suppressed interaction. If late
8
1e-007
1e-006
1e-005
0.0001
0.001
0.01
0.1
1
0.001 0.01 0.1 1 10 Small
T
r
a
n
s
f
e
r

F
u
n
c
t
i
o
n
k in h/Mpc
SDSS data
No decay
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
6
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
7
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
8
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
9
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
10
Figure 6: CDM Transfer function calculation. Varying the life time. As decay time goes
larger, it aect larger scale.
1e-007
1e-006
1e-005
0.0001
0.001
0.01
0.1
1
0.001 0.01 0.1 1 10 Small
T
r
a
n
s
f
e
r

F
u
n
c
t
i
o
n
k in h/Mpc
SDSS data
No decay
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.9, t
d
=10
9
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.7, t
d
=10
9
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.5, t
d
=10
9
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.3, t
d
=10
9
All decay, m
d1
/m
o
=0.1, t
d
=10
9
Figure 7: CDM Transfer function calculation. Varying the mass ratio. If the masses are
closer, decay will produce smaller eect.
9
1e-007
1e-006
1e-005
0.0001
0.001
0.01
0.1
1
0.001 0.01 0.1 1 10 Small
T
r
a
n
s
f
e
r

F
u
n
c
t
i
o
n
k in h/Mpc
SDSS data
No decay
10
-5
decay, m
d1
/m
o
=10
-5
, t
d
=10
9
3*10
-5
decay, m
d1
/m
o
=10
-5
, t
d
=10
9
10
-4
decay, m
d1
/m
o
=10
-5
, t
d
=10
9
Figure 8: CDM Transfer function calculation. A tiny
d
with a similarly hierarchy mass
ratio, and
c
= 0.224.
and hierarchy decay does happen, this decaying part is constraint to be small compared to
all dark matter. So even if it is still possible at some parameter region (by a conspiracy of
reheating temperature, near degeneracy of mass states, and relic density of NLSP in [5]),
the light gravitino dark matter scenario as predicted by gauge mediated susy breaking is
at least unnatural.
We havent performed a global
2
analysis at this stage, that will be the future objec-
tive. As for observation, we call for more measurement on spatial power spectrum on a
smaller scale.
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