Atomic dark matter

By D. Kaplan, G. Krnjaic, Keith R. Rehermann, C. Wells. 2009

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose that dark matter is dominantly comprised of atomic bound states. We build a simple model and map the parameter space that results in the early universe formation of hydrogen-like dark atoms. We find that atomic dark matter has interesting implications for cosmology as well as direct detection: Weak-scale dark atoms can accommodate hyperfine splittings of order 100 keV, consistent with the inelastic dark matter interpretation of the DAMA data while naturally evading direct detection bounds. Moreover, protohalo formation can be suppressed below Mproto ~ 103–106M⊙ for weak scale dark matter due to Ion-Radiation and Ion-Atom interactions in the dark sector.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f242542e217468537ff1e810cbc89c9ce698f8a

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Self-Interacting Dark Matter from a Non-Abelian Hidden Sector (2014, background): “These mixed scenarios are strongly interacting analogues of atomic dark matter [103–107] and inspire further simulation of the galactic dynamics in cases where there are two components of dark matter with naturally very different mass scales and different selfinteraction rates.”
Dark halos around neutron stars and gravitational waves (2018, background): “Such objects are possible in some models of self-interacting DM such as atomic dark matter which contain particles and interactions that can lead to the formation of macroscopic objects through cooling mechanisms analogous to the baryonic sector [58].”
Colliding clusters and dark matter self-interactions (2013, background): “Such longrange interactions arise naturally in models of mirror DM (Blinnikov & Khlopov 1983; Kolb, Seckel & Turner 1985; Berezhiani, Dolgov & Mohapatra 1996; Foot 2004) or atomic DM (Kaplan et al. 2010; Cline, Liu & Xue 2012; Cyr-Racine & Sigurdson 2013).”
Double-Disk Dark Matter (2013, background): “, atoms with Bohr radii a0 ∼ m−1/α at weak coupling α, which have cross sections even larger than 4πa(2)0 [18]).”
New physics in light of the H0 tension: An alternative view (2019, unknown): “[248–266] for examples of such models.”
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].”