Hidden charged dark matter

By Jonathan L. Feng, M. Kaplinghat, H. Tu, Hai-Bo Yu. 2009

430 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Can dark matter be stabilized by charge conservation, just as the electron is in the standard model? We examine the possibility that dark matter is hidden, that is, neutral under all standard model gauge interactions, but charged under an exact {\rm U}(1) gauge symmetry of the hidden sector. Such candidates are predicted in WIMPless models, supersymmetric models in which hidden dark matter has the desired thermal relic density for a wide range of masses. Hidden charged dark matter has many novel properties not shared by neutral dark matter: (1) bound state formation and Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation after chemical freeze out may reduce its relic density, (2) similar effects greatly enhance dark matter annihilation in protohalos at redshifts of z ~ 30, (3) Compton scattering off hidden photons delays kinetic decoupling, suppressing small scale structure, and (4) Rutherford scattering makes such dark matter self-interacting and collisional, potentially impacting properties of the Bullet Cluster and the observed morphology of galactic halos. We analyze all of these effects in a WIMPless model in which the hidden sector is a simplified version of the minimal supersymmetric standard model and the dark matter is a hidden sector stau. We find that charged hidden dark matter is viable and consistent with the correct relic density for reasonable model parameters and dark matter masses in the range 1 GeV mX 10 TeV. At the same time, in the preferred range of parameters, this model predicts cores in the dark matter halos of small galaxies and other halo properties that may be within the reach of future observations. These models therefore provide a viable and well-motivated framework for collisional dark matter with Sommerfeld enhancement, with novel implications for astrophysics and dark matter searches.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e31e91870c064166d5c14384b0bbec1b4eba5a6

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Citations in the corpus

The four basic ways of creating dark matter through a portal (2011, neutral): “Our bound is compatible, but slightly milder than in [11].”
Colliding clusters and dark matter self-interactions (2013, background): “First of all, we consider the case where DM particles interact with each other via the exchange of a massless vector mediator (such as a dark photon; Ackerman et al. 2009; Feng et al. 2009).”
Constraining self-interacting dark matter with the Milky Way’s dwarf spheroidals (2012, background): “…proposed (Yoshida et al. 2000) and explored with cosmological simulations (Colı́n et al. 2002) a decade ago, its theoretical support has come up only recently (e.g. Ackerman et al. 2009; Feng et al. 2009, 2010; Buckley & Fox 2010; Loeb & Weiner 2011; van den Aarssen et al. 2012; Tulin et al. 2012).”
Bound-state formation for thermal relic dark matter and unitarity (2014, background): “However, we find some discrepancies in the way the cross-section for radiative formation of positronium-like states was adapted in [32] from [33]; this led to underestimating the effect.”
The Dark Photon (2020, background): “5 weaker than (Feng et al., 2009) (see, also, (Feng et al.”
What does the Bullet Cluster tell us about Self-Interacting Dark Matter? (2016, background): “…to scattering between DM particles (Carlson, Machacek & Hall 1992; Bento et al. 2000; Kusenko & Steinhardt 2001; Mohapatra, Nussinov & Teplitz 2002; Feng et al. 2009; Tulin, Yu & Zurek 2013b; Boddy et al. 2014; Kaplinghat, Tulin & Yu 2014; Wang, Zhang & Zhao 2016), so it is an important…”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “Such deviations can occur if the SIDM model contains a relatively light force carrier, such as the dark photon discussed in the previous section [37, 192, 193, 39] or dark pion from a confining sector [194].”
A taste of dark matter: flavour constraints on pseudoscalar mediators (2014, neutral): “In particular, the Born approximation predicts that for scattering via pseudoscalar exchange there is no enhancement of DM self-interactions for small velocities, which has been invoked to help reconcile observational constraints from galaxy clusters and elliptical galaxies with the self-interaction”
Dark matter halo merger histories beyond cold dark matter – I. Methods and application to warm dark matter (2012, background): “…Abazajian, Fuller & Patel 2001; Cheng, Feng & Matchev 2002; Feng, Rajaraman & Takayama 2003; Sigurdson & Kamionkowski 2004; Hubisz & Meade 2005; Feng et al. 2009) have been put forward to explain these deviations, although it remains unclear if any of these proposals is able to fully explain…”