Shedding light on the small-scale crisis with CMB spectral distortions

The small-scale crisis, discrepancies between observations and N -body simulations, may imply suppressed matter fluctuations on subgalactic distance scales. Such a suppression could be caused by some early-universe mechanism (e.g., broken scale invariance during inflation), leading to a modification of the primordial power spectrum at the onset of the radiation-domination era. Alternatively, it may be due to nontrivial dark-matter properties (e.g., new dark-matter interactions or warm dark matter) that affect the matter power spectrum at late times, during radiation domination, after the perturbations reenter the horizon. We show that early- and late-time suppression mechanisms can be distinguished by measurement of the μ distortion to the frequency spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. This is because the μ distortion is suppressed, if the power suppression is primordial, relative to the value expected from the dissipation of standard nearly scale-invariant fluctuations. We emphasize that the standard prediction of the μ distortion remains unchanged in late-time scenarios even if the dark-matter effects occur before or during the era (redshifts 5 ×1 0⁴≲z ≲2 ×1 0⁶ ) at which μ distortions are generated.