Cosmologically probing ultra-light particle dark matter using 21 cm signals

Abstract: There can arise ubiquitous ultra-light scalar fields in the Universe, such as the pseudo-Goldstone bosons from the spontaneous breaking of an approximate symmetry, which can make a partial contribution to the dark matter and affect the large scale structure of the Universe. While the properties of those ultra-light dark matter are heavily model dependent and can vary in a wide range, we develop a model-independent analysis to forecast the constraints on their mass and abundance using futuristic but realistic 21 cm observables as well as CMB fluctuations, including CMB lensing measurements. Avoiding the highly nonlinear regime, the 21 cm emission line spectra are most sensitive to the ultra-light dark matter with mass m ~10^{-26} eV for which the precision attainable on mass and abundance bounds can be of order of a few percent.