Dark matter self-interactions and light force carriers

By M. Fox. 2009

236 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent observations from PAMELA, FERMI, and ATIC point to a new source of high energy cosmic rays. If these signals are due to annihilating dark matter (DM), the annihilation cross section in the present day must be substantially larger than that necessary for thermal freeze-out in the early universe. A new force, mediated by a particle of mass O(100 MeV), leading to a velocity-dependent annihilation cross section—a “Sommerfeld enhancement”—has been proposed as a possible explanation. We point out that such models necessarily increase the DM self-scattering cross section, and use observational bounds on the amount of DM-DM scattering allowed in various astrophysical systems to place constraints on the mass and couplings of the light mediator.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97b90f7556a4889f9cf2b59cac2f20465e879aa9

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmological simulations with self-interacting dark matter – II. Halo shapes versus observations (2012, methodology): “Constraints on dark-matter scattering have also been made using the shapes of significantly smaller dark-matter halos, Mvir ∼ 1012 − 1013M (Feng et al. 2009; Feng, Kaplinghat & Yu 2010; Buckley & Fox 2010; McDermott, Yu & Zurek 2011).”
Subhaloes in self-interacting galactic dark matter haloes (2012, methodology): “There is a summary of these and other constrains in Table I of Buckley & Fox (2010) and in Figure 2 of Loeb & Weiner (2011): on the scales of dwarf galaxies, σvel ∼ 10 km s−1, the allowed values for the transfer cross section are roughly constrained from above by σmaxT /mχ .”
A taste of dark matter: flavour constraints on pseudoscalar mediators (2014, unknown): “J H E P 0 3 ( 2 0 1 5 ) 1 7 1 Nevertheless, a very different behaviour can be expected in the strongly-interacting regime [49, 55].”
Semiconductor Probes of Light Dark Matter (2012, background): “Details on the U(1) mixing constraints can be found in [54], while the strongest constraints on DM self-coupling are explained in [5, 55, 56].”
A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, methodology): “In these regimes, a numerical solution for σ has been performed [149, 154].”
Colliding clusters and dark matter self-interactions (2013, background): “…long-range interactions can be significantly relaxed if the mediator of the interaction has a small but non-zero mass so that DM self-interactions become velocity independent in systems with low velocity such as dwarf spheroidal galaxies (Buckley & Fox 2010; Loeb & Weiner 2011; Tulin et al. 2013).”
Production regimes for Self-Interacting Dark Matter (2015, methodology): “It is known as resonant regime because in this case the formation of quasi-bound states becomes possible and there is an enhancement on the self-scattering cross section by a few orders of magnitude [29, 31].”
What does the Bullet Cluster tell us about Self-Interacting Dark Matter? (2016, background): “Velocity-dependent cross-sections can arise naturally in models for SIDM (Ackerman et al. 2009; Buckley & Fox 2010; Loeb & Weiner 2011; van den Aarssen, Bringmann & Pfrommer 2012; Tulin, Yu & Zurek 2013a), and constraining such models requires a handle on the cross-section at different velocity…”
Double-Disk Dark Matter (2013, background): “Explorations of dark matter with different astrophysical consequences are mostly limited to warm dark matter and self-interacting dark matter, with the latter usually assuming a fixed cross section for point-like interactions or, at times, velocity dependence [123–128]; though see also [129].”
The Dark Photon (2020, background): “…for example, (van den Aarssen et al., 2012; Ackerman et al., 2009; Agrawal et al., 2017; Arkani-Hamed et al., 2009; Baldi, 2013; Boddy et al., 2014; Buckley and Fox, 2010; Buen-Abad et al., 2015; Carlson et al., 1992; Chu and Dasgupta, 2014; Cline et al., 2014, 2012; Cyr-Racine and Sigurdson,…”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “For velocity-dependent cross sections, cores can show up for only a narrow range of halo mass, leaving halos outside this mass range relatively unperturbed with respect to CDM [215, 64, 162, 216, 119, 190].”