IITB-PHY11122017 PREPARED FOR SUBMISSION TO JCAP On dark matter - dark radiation interaction and cosmic reionization Subinoy Das,a Rajesh Mondal,b;c Vikram Rentala,d Srikanth Suresha aIndian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru – 560034, India bAstronomy Centre, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QH, U.K. cDepartment of Physics and Centre for Theoretical Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Kharag- pur, Kharagpur – 721302, India dDepartment of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076, India E-mail:
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[email protected] Abstract. The dark matter sector of our universe can be much richer than the conventional picture of a single weakly interacting cold dark matter particle species. An intriguing possibility is that the dark matter particle interacts with a dark radiation component. If the non-gravitational interactions of the dark matter and dark radiation species with Standard Model particles are highly suppressed, then astrophysics and cosmology could be our only windows into probing the dynamics of such a dark sector. It is well known that such dark sectors would lead to suppression of small scale structure, which would be constrained by measurements of the Lyman-α forest. In this work we consider the cosmological signatures of such dark sectors on the reionization history of our universe. Working within the recently proposed “ETHOS” (effective theory of structure formation) framework, we show that if such a dark sector exists in our universe, the suppression of low mass dark matter halos would also reduce the total number of ionizing photons, thus affecting the reionization history of our universe.