Mass varying dark matter and its cosmological signature

Abstract

Nontrivial dark sector physics continues to be an interesting avenue in our quest to the nature of dark matter. In this paper, we study the cosmological signatures of mass-varying dark matter where its mass changes from zero to a nonzero value in the early Universe. We compute the changes in various observables, such as, the linear matter power spectrum and the cosmic microwave background anisotropy power spectrum. We explain the origin of the effects and point out a qualitative similarity between this model and a warm dark matter cosmology with no sudden mass transition. Finally, we do a simple analytical study to estimate the constraint on the parameters of this model from the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest data.