Cosmic-Ray Cooling in Active Galactic Nuclei as a New Probe of Inelastic Dark Matter

Abstract

We present a novel way to probe inelastic dark matter using cosmic-ray (CR) cooling in active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Dark matter (DM) in the vicinity of supermassive black holes may scatter off CRs, resulting in the rapid cooling of CRs for sufficiently large cross sections. This in turn can alter the high-energy neutrino and gamma-ray fluxes detected from these sources. We show that AGN cooling bounds obtained through the multimessenger data of NGC 1068 and TXS 0506+056 allow to reach unprecedently large mass splittings for inelastic DM ($\gtrsim$ TeV), orders of magnitude larger than those probed by direct detection experiments and DM capture in neutron stars. Furthermore, we demonstrate that cooling bounds from AGNs can probe thermal light DM with small mass splittings. This provides novel and complementary constraints in parts of a parameter space accessible solely by colliders and beam dump experiments.

7 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Material: 6 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (23)

• A Theory of Dark Matter
• Magnetic Inelastic Dark Matter
• Higgsino Dark Matter in High-Scale Supersymmetry
• Hidden Hearts of Neutrino Active Galaxies
• Collisionally Regenerated Dark Matter Structures in Galactic Nuclei
• The Inelastic Frontier: Discovering Dark Matter at High Recoil Energy
• Cosmic-ray upscattered inelastic dark matter
• High-Energy Neutrinos from Active Galactic Nuclei
• Electroweakly-Interacting Dirac Dark Matter
• Revealing the Production Mechanism of High-Energy Neutrinos from NGC 1068
• Capture of Electroweak Multiplet Dark Matter in Neutron Stars
• The ups and downs of inelastic dark matter: Electron recoils from terrestrial upscattering
• Heating Neutron Stars with Inelastic Dark Matter and Relativistic Targets
• Active Galactic Nuclei as potential Sources of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays
• Constraining Light Thermal Inelastic Dark Matter with NA64
• Probing Light Dark Matter through Cosmic-Ray Cooling in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Spin-dependent sub-GeV Inelastic Dark Matter-electron scattering and Migdal effect: (I). Velocity Independent Operator
• Enhanced prospects for direct detection of inelastic dark matter from a non-galactic diffuse component
• Starburst Nuclei as Light Dark Matter Laboratories
• Detection of Inelastic Dark Matter via Electron Recoils in SENSEI
• Explorations of pseudo-Dirac dark matter having keV splittings and interacting via transition electric and magnetic dipole moments
• Low-mass constraints on WIMP effective models of inelastic scattering using the Migdal effect
• Low-Mass dark matter (in)direct detection with inelastic scattering

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Boosted dark matter versus dark matter-induced neutrinos from single and stacked blazars