Constraints on millicharged particles from Planck

Abstract

We revisit cosmic microwave background (CMB) constraints on the abundance of millicharged particles based on the Planck data. The stringent limit Omega_{mcp}h^2 < 0.001 (95% CL) may be set using the CMB data alone if millicharged particles participate in the acoustic oscillations of baryon-photon plasma at the recombination epoch. The latter condition is valid for a wide region of charges and masses of the particles. Adding the millicharged component to LCDM shifts prefered scalar spectral index of primordial perturbations to somewhat larger values as compared to minimal model, even approaching Harrison-Zeldovich spectrum under some assumptions.