Photon proliferation from multi-body dark matter annihilation

A bstract Multi-body dark matter annihilation is commonly expected to be suppressed by higher-order couplings and phase-space factors, therefore being ignored thus far. We show that, however, this does not hold for a class of nonthermal dark matter scenarios, where the dark matter particle becomes nonrelativistic at temperatures much higher than its mass. We exemplify such a multi-body process via ultralight pseudoscalar dark matter annihilation to diphotons, which leads to a novel photon proliferation effect in the early Universe. As a phenomenological application, we consider the photon temperature shift after neutrino decoupling, showing that the photon proliferation effect can render bounds on the ultralight dark matter couplings stronger than the existing constraints by several orders of magnitude. Our research can be extended to other interactions and dark matter candidates, highlighting the importance of multi-body processes in the early Universe.