Edges and Endpoints in 21-cm Observations from Resonant Photon Production.

We introduce a novel class of signatures-spectral edges and end points-in 21-cm measurements resulting from interactions between the standard and dark sectors. Within the context of a kinetically mixed dark photon, we demonstrate how resonant dark photon-to-photon conversions can imprint distinctive spectral features in the observed 21-cm brightness temperature, with implications for current, upcoming, and proposed experiments targeting the cosmic dawn and the dark ages. These signatures open up a qualitatively new way to look for physics beyond the Standard Model using 21-cm observations.

Room for New Physics in the Rayleigh-Jeans Tail of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

We show that, despite stringent constraints on the shape of the main part of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectrum, there is considerable room for its modification within its Rayleigh-Jeans (RJ) end, ω≪T_{CMB}. We construct explicit new physics models that give an order one (or larger) increase of photon count in the RJ tail, which can be tested by existing and upcoming experiments aiming to detect the cosmological 21 cm emission or absorption signal. This class of models stipulates the decay of unstable particles to dark photons A^{'} that have a small mass, m_{A^{'}}∼10^{-14}-10^{-9}  eV, nonvanishing mixing angle ε with electromagnetism, and energies much smaller than T_{CMB}.