Light dark photon and fermionic dark radiation for the Hubble constant and the structure formation

Motivated by the tensions in the Hubble constant H0 and the structure growth σ8 between Planck results and other low redshift measurements, we discuss some cosmological effects of a dark sector model in which dark matter (DM) interacts with fermionic dark radiation (DR) through a light gauge boson (dark photon). Such kind of models are very generic in particle physics with a dark sector with dark gauge symmetries. The effective number of neutrinos is increased by δNeff∼0.5 due to light dark photon and fermionic DR, thereby resolving the conflicts in H0. The elastic scattering between DM and DR induces suppression for DM's density perturbation, but without acoustic oscillations. For weakly-interacting DM around 100 GeV, the new gauge coupling should be ∼10−4 to have sizable effect on matter power spectrum in order to relax the tension in σ8.