A balance for Dark Matter bound states

Abstract

Massive particles with self interactions of the order of 0.2 barn/GeV are intriguing Dark Matter candidates from an astrophysical point of view. Current and past experiments for direct detection of massive Dark Matter particles are focusing to relatively low cross sections with ordinary matter, however they cannot rule out very large cross sections, $\sigma /M>0.01$ barn/GeV, due to atmosphere and material shielding. Cosmology places a strong indirect limit for the presence of large interactions among Dark Matter and baryons in the Universe, however such a limit cannot rule out the existence of a small sub-dominant component of Dark Matter with non negligible interactions with ordinary matter in our galactic halo. Here, the possibility of the existence of bound states with ordinary matter, for a similar Dark Matter candidate with not negligible interactions, is considered. The existence of bound states, with binding energy larger than $\sim$1 meV, would offer the possibility to test in laboratory capture cross sections of the order of a barn (or larger). The signature of the detection for a mass increasing of cryogenic samples, due to the possible particle accumulation, would allow the investigation of these Dark Matter candidates with mass up to the GUT scale. A proof of concept for a possible detection set-up and the evaluation of some noise sources are described.

39 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (9)

• The non-gravitational interactions of dark matter in colliding galaxy clusters
• Thin, thick and dark discs in LCDM
• The behaviour of dark matter associated with 4 bright cluster galaxies in the 10kpc core of Abell 3827
• Towards Closing the Window on Strongly Interacting Dark Matter: Far-Reaching Constraints from Earth's Heat Flow
• Dark-matter bound states from Feynman diagrams
• Looking for milli-charged particles with a new experiment at the LHC
• SIMPle Dark Matter: Self-Interactions and keV Lines
• Daily Modulation as a Smoking Gun of Dark Matter with Significant Stopping
• Resonant bar detector constraints on macro dark matter

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Zero-Range Effective Field Theory for Resonant Wino Dark Matter I. Framework