paper

Probing Light Dark Matter through Cosmic-Ray Cooling in Active Galactic Nuclei

arXiv:2307.09460 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.110.L011701

Abstract

Recent observations of high-energy neutrinos from active galactic nuclei (AGN), NGC 1068 and TXS 0506+056, suggest that cosmic rays (CRs) are accelerated in the vicinity of the central supermassive black hole and high-energy protons and electrons can cool efficiently via interactions with ambient photons and gas. The dark matter density may be significantly enhanced near the central black hole, and CRs could lose energies predominantly due to scatterings with the ambient dark matter particles. We propose CR cooling in AGN as a new probe of dark matter-proton and dark matter-electron scatterings. Under plausible astrophysical assumptions, our constraints on sub-GeV dark matter can be the strongest derived to date. Some of the parameter space favored by thermal light dark matter models might already be probed with current multimessenger observations of AGN.

Matches published version in PRD as a Letter. Extended discussion on the adiabatic growth assumption of the SMBH of NGC 1068 and TXS 0506+056, and on the uncertainties on the DM distribution. Extended discussion on the parameter space of thermal and non-thermal light DM that we are able to probe, and comparison of our constraints with complementary bounds on light scalar mediators

References in corpus (12)

Cited by in corpus (11)