ASTROPHYSICAL CONSTRAINTS ON MASSIVE UNSTABLE NEUTRAL RELIC PARTICLES

There has recently been renewed interest in massive neutral dark-matter particle candidates with masses greater than ∼ 1 TeV which may be unstable. We re-evaluate the constraints on such particles from the possible effects of their decays on the spectrum of the microwave background-radiation and the...

وصف كامل

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
المؤلفون الرئيسيون: Ellis, J, Gelmini, G, Lopez, J, Nanopoulos, D, Sarkar, S
التنسيق: Journal article
منشور في: 1992
الوصف
الملخص:There has recently been renewed interest in massive neutral dark-matter particle candidates with masses greater than ∼ 1 TeV which may be unstable. We re-evaluate the constraints on such particles from the possible effects of their decays on the spectrum of the microwave background-radiation and the primordially synthesised abundances of the light elements, from observations of the diffuse gamma-ray background radiation, and from searches for muons and neutrinos in nucleon-decay and cosmic-ray detectors. We find that such unstable neutral relics may well have the cosmological critical density if their lifetime exceeds ∼ 1016 yr. We illustrate our arguments by applying them to technicolour baryons and to "cryptons" in superstring-inspired models. © 1992.