Molecular Chemistry for Dark Matter

Abstract

Molecular cooling is essential for studying the formation of sub-structure of dissipative dark-matter halos that may host compact objects such as black holes. Here, we analyze the reaction rates relevant for the formation, dissociation, and transition of hydrogenic molecules while allowing for different values of the physical parameters: the coupling constant, the proton mass, and the electron mass. For all cases, we re-scale the reaction rates for the standard molecular hydrogen, so our results are valid as long as the dark matter is weakly coupled and one of the fermions is much heavier than the other. These results will allow a robust numerical treatment of cosmic structure, in particular for mini-halos for which molecular cooling is important, in a dissipative dark matter scenario.

30 pages, 5 figures. Updated with changes for published version

References in corpus (15)

• The effect of photo-ionization on the cooling rates of enriched, astrophysical plasmas
• Dark Matter and Dark Radiation
• Uncertainties in H2 and HD Chemistry and Cooling and their Role in Early Structure Formation
• Constraining Asymmetric Dark Matter through observations of compact stars
• Detecting Dark Matter with Imploding Pulsars in the Galactic Center
• Hidden Sector Hydrogen as Dark Matter: Small-scale Structure Formation Predictions and the Importance of Hyperfine Interactions
• Structure Formation and Exotic Compact Objects in a Dissipative Dark Sector
• Massive Black Holes from Dissipative Dark Matter
• Mirror Neutron Stars
• On the Validity of Collider-Mass Scaling for Molecular Rotational Excitation
• Cooling in a Dissipative Dark Sector
• Ortho-para transition in molecular hydrogen
• Higgs portals to pulsar collapse
• Chemistry of TMC-1 with multiply deuterated species and spin chemistry of H2, H2+, H3+ and their isotopologues
• Rotational quenching rate coefficients for H_2 in collisions with H_2 from 2 to 10,000 K

Cited by in corpus (8)

• A Lower Bound on the Mass of Compact Objects from Dissipative 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
• The Effect of Multiple Cooling Channels on the Formation of Dark Compact Objects
• Cool dark sector, concordance, and a low ${\sigma }_8$
• Towards a theory of dissipative Dark Matter I: the Born limit