3,294 research outputs found
Relic density and CMB constraints on dark matter annihilation with Sommerfeld enhancement
We calculate how the relic density of dark matter particles is altered when
their annihilation is enhanced by the Sommerfeld mechanism due to a Yukawa
interaction between the annihilating particles. Maintaining a dark matter
abundance consistent with current observational bounds requires the
normalization of the s-wave annihilation cross section to be decreased compared
to a model without enhancement. The level of suppression depends on the
specific parameters of the particle model, with the kinetic decoupling
temperature having the most effect. We find that the cross section can be
reduced by as much as an order of magnitude for extreme cases. We also compute
the mu-type distortion of the CMB energy spectrum caused by energy injection
from such Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation. Our results indicate that in the
vicinity of resonances, associated with bound states, distortions can be large
enough to be excluded by the upper limit |mu|<9.0x10^(-5) found by the
COBE/FIRAS experiment.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review D.
Corrections to eqs. 9,10,14 and 16. Figures updated accordingly. No major
changes to previous results. Website with online tools for Sommerfeld-related
calculations can be found at
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~vogelsma/sommerfeld
A Parallel Decomposition Scheme for Solving Long-Horizon Optimal Control Problems
We present a temporal decomposition scheme for solving long-horizon optimal
control problems. In the proposed scheme, the time domain is decomposed into a
set of subdomains with partially overlapping regions. Subproblems associated
with the subdomains are solved in parallel to obtain local primal-dual
trajectories that are assembled to obtain the global trajectories. We provide a
sufficient condition that guarantees convergence of the proposed scheme. This
condition states that the effect of perturbations on the boundary conditions
(i.e., initial state and terminal dual/adjoint variable) should decay
asymptotically as one moves away from the boundaries. This condition also
reveals that the scheme converges if the size of the overlap is sufficiently
large and that the convergence rate improves with the size of the overlap. We
prove that linear quadratic problems satisfy the asymptotic decay condition,
and we discuss numerical strategies to determine if the condition holds in more
general cases. We draw upon a non-convex optimal control problem to illustrate
the performance of the proposed scheme
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