Speaker
Mr
Hongwan Liu
(MIT)
Description
Measurements of the CMB and future 21-cm results can set significant constraints on dark matter annihilation or decay. To obtain such limits, a good understanding of how dark matter energy injection affects the ionization and thermal history of the universe is crucial. In this talk, I will present a new and open-source code package called `DarkHistory`, which will compute these histories efficiently and accurately. The code will fully account for both the non-instantaneous nature of energy deposition during the dark ages, and the back-reaction of increased ionization levels on energy deposition into the intergalactic medium, allowing `DarkHistory` to be used at the end of the cosmic dark ages and during the epoch of reionization. Improvements to various cooling and deposition processes such as inverse Compton scattering and photo-excitation will also be discussed.
