Dark matter annihilation and jet quenching phenomena in the early universe

Abstract

Dark-matter particles like neutralinos should decouple from the hot cosmic plasma at temperatures of about 40 GeV. Later they can annihilate each other into standard-model particles, which are injected into the dense primordial plasma and quickly loose energy. This process is similar to jet quenching in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, actively studied in RHIC and LHC experiments. Using empirical information from heavy-ion experiments I show that the cosmological (anti)quark and gluon jets are damped very quickly until the plasma remains in the deconfined phase. The charged hadron and lepton jets are strongly damped until the recombination of electrons and protons. The consequences of energy transfer by the annihilation products to the cosmic matter are discussed.