Exploring the astrophysics of dark atoms

Abstract

A component of the dark matter could consist of two darkly charged particles with a large mass ratio and a massless force carrier. This `atomic' dark sector could behave much like the baryonic sector, cooling and fragmenting down to stellar-mass or smaller scales. Past studies have shown that cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure constraints rule out $\gtrsim 5\%$ of the dark matter to behave in this manner. However, we show that, even with percent level mass fractions, a dark atomic sector could affect some extragalactic and galactic observables. We track the cooling and merger history of an atomic dark component for much of the interesting parameter space. Unlike the baryons, where stellar feedback (driven by nuclear physics) delays the formation and growth of galaxies, cooling dark atomic gas typically results in disks forming earlier, leaving more time for their destruction via mergers. Rather than disks in Milky Way sized halos, we find the end product is typically spheroidal structures on galactic scales or dark atom fragments distributed on halo scales. This result contrasts with previous studies, which had assumed that the dark atoms would result in dark disks. Furthermore the dark atoms condense into dense clumps, analogous to how the baryons fragment on solar-mass scales. We estimate the size of these dark clumps, and use these estimates to show that viable atomic dark matter parameter space is ruled out by stellar microlensing, by the half-light radii of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, and by Milky Way mass-to-light inferences.

20 pages and 7 figures, added references and fixed minor typos

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Cited by in corpus (18)

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• Gravitational Waves from Binary Mergers of Sub-solar Mass Dark Black Holes
• Structure Formation and Exotic Compact Objects in a Dissipative Dark Sector
• Dark atoms and composite dark matter
• A Lower Bound on the Mass of Compact Objects from Dissipative Dark Matter
• Direct Detection of Mirror Matter in Twin Higgs Models
• Molecular Chemistry for Dark Matter
• Constraining galactic structures of mirror dark matter
• Molecular Chemistry for Dark Matter II: Recombination, Molecule Formation, and Halo Mass Function in Atomic Dark Matter
• Molecular Chemistry for Dark Matter III: DarkKROME
• Dark Black Holes in the Mass Gap
• Baryogenesis through Asymmetric Reheating in the Mirror Twin Higgs
• Astrophysical Plasma Instabilities induced by Long-Range Interacting Dark Matter
• Cool dark sector, concordance, and a low ${\sigma }_8$
• On Quantum and Classical Treatments of Radiative Recombination
• Scattering meets absorption in dark matter detection
• Dark matter with excitable levels