Dynamics of millicharged dark matter in supernova remnants

Abstract

Dark matter could have a small electromagnetic charge, provided the charge-to-mass ratio is much less than that of electrons or protons. This candidate, commonly known as millicharged dark matter (mDM), would form a plasma and interact with the interstellar medium and electromagnetic fields within galaxies. In general, understanding the dynamics of mDM requires consideration of collective plasma effects. It has been proposed that mDM can be accelerated in supernova remnants, forming a dark cosmic ray population that would leave distinct experimental signatures. In this work, we study a microphysical model where mDM is shocked by a supernova remnant and isotropized in the frame of the expanding fluid. We find that for $|q_{\chi }/m_{\chi }|\gtrsim 10^{-13}e/\mathrm{MeV}$, the isotropization length for electromagnetic plasma instabilities is much shorter than the size of the supernova remnant. This is a necessary, though not sufficient, first step for formation of a Fermi-accelerated mDM component, and determining the size of this component requires further study. We discuss additional implications of mDM interactions in supernova remnants.

38 pages, 13 figures; Refs. and Fig. 1 updated in v2

References in corpus (10)

• Turning off the Lights: How Dark is Dark Matter?
• US Cosmic Visions: New Ideas in Dark Matter 2017: Community Report
• Making dark matter out of light: freeze-in from plasma effects
• Simulations and Theory of Ion Injection at Non-relativistic Collisionless Shocks
• Reviving Millicharged Dark Matter for 21-cm Cosmology
• Reopening the window on charged dark matter
• Looking for milli-charged particles with a new experiment at the LHC
• Dark Cosmic Rays
• New Limits on Charged Dark Matter from Large-Scale Coherent Magnetic Fields
• Particle acceleration and wave excitation in quasi-parallel high-Mach-number collisionless shocks: Particle-in-cell simulation

Cited by in corpus (18)

• New Constraints on Millicharged Particles from Cosmic-ray Production
• Searches for light dark matter using condensed matter systems
• The cosmology of sub-MeV dark matter freeze-in
• FORMOSA: Looking Forward to Millicharged Dark Sectors
• A Dark Matter Interpretation of Excesses in Multiple Direct Detection Experiments
• Millicharged Cosmic Rays and Low Recoil Detectors
• Plasmon production from dark matter scattering
• Long range dark matter self-interactions and plasma instabilities
• Dark Matter from Monogem
• Passage of millicharged particles in the electron beam-dump: refining constraints from SLACmQ and estimating sensitivity of NA64e
• Experimental Limits on Solar Reflected Dark Matter with a New Approach on Accelerated-Dark-Matter-Electron Analysis in Semiconductors
• Astrophysical Plasma Instabilities induced by Long-Range Interacting Dark Matter
• Dark plasmas in the nonlinear regime: constraints from particle-in-cell simulations
• Reacceleration of charged dark matter
• Soft Scattering Evaporation of Dark Matter Subhalos by Inner Galactic Gases
• The Terrestrial Density of Strongly-Coupled Relics
• Structure Formation with Dark Magnetohydrodynamics
• Hadrophilic Light Dark Matter from the Atmosphere