Nonuniversal BBN bounds on electromagnetically decaying particles

Abstract

In Poulin and Serpico [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 091101 (2015)] we recently argued that when the energy of a photon injected in the primordial plasma falls below the pair-production threshold the universality of the nonthermal photon spectrum from the standard theory of electromagnetic cascades onto a photon background breaks down. We showed that this could reopen or widen the parameter space for an exotic solution to the "lithium problem." Here we discuss another application, namely the impact that this has on nonthermal big bang nucleosynthesis constraints from He4, He3, and H2, using the parametric example of monochromatic photon injection of different energies. Typically, we find tighter bounds than those existing in the literature, up to more than 1 order of magnitude. As a consequence of the nonuniversality of the spectrum, the energy dependence of the photodissociation cross sections is important. We also compare the constraints obtained with current level and future reach of cosmic microwave background spectral distortion bounds.