BBN constraints on the hadronic annihilation of sub-GeV dark matter

We investigate the impact of residual annihilation from sub-GeV mass thermal relic dark matter candidates during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). Focusing on candidates with p -wave annihilation channels, we show that the hadronic injection of pions and kaons beyond freeze-out, and their subsequent interaction with protons and neutrons prior to the deuterium bottleneck, provides a sensitivity to annihilation that surpasses that of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and indirect detection in the galaxy.