Self-interacting Dark Radiation

Abstract

We consider a simple class of models where dark radiation has self-interactions and therefore does not free stream. Such dark radiation has no anisotropic stress (or viscosity), leaving a distinct signature on the CMB angular power spectrum. Specifically we study a possibility that hidden gauge bosons and/or chiral fermions account for the excess of the effective number of neutrino species. They have gauge interactions and remain light due to the unbroken hidden gauge symmetry, leading to \Delta N_{\rm eff} \simeq 0.29 in some case.

Comments: 14 pages, 3 figures; v3: references added, published version