Probing interactions within the dark matter sector via extra radiation contributions

Understand

The nature of dark matter is one of the most thrilling riddles for both cosmology and particle physics nowadays.

• While in the typical models the dark sector is composed only by weakly interacting massive particles, an arguably more natural scenario would include a whole set of gauge interactions which are invisible for the standard model but that are in contact with the dark matter.
• We present a method to constrain the number of massless gauge bosons and other relativistic particles that might be present in the dark sector using current and future cosmic microwave background data, and provide upper bounds on the size of the dark sector.
• We use the fact that the dark matter abundance depends on the strength of the interactions with both sectors, which allows one to relate the freeze-out temperature of the dark matter with the temperature of {this cosmic background of dark gauge bosons}.