Cosmological Constraints on Long-Lived Particles Using Dimension-Six Effective Operators
Abstract
Long-lived particles (LLPs) provide an interesting window into physics beyond the Standard Model, offering characteristic signatures at colliders and in cosmology. In this work, we investigate LLPs decays into dark matter. If the lifetime of LLPs are longer than 104s, the decay products can disrupt the synthesis of light nuclei in the early universe and alter Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) predictions. If the LLP is much heavier than the dark matter particle, the decay contributes to the number of effective neutrino species, Neff. We describe these decays via dimension-six effective operators and outline the parameter space in which such decays obey cosmological bounds stemming from BBN, structure formation, Cosmic Microwave Background, and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation data.