Make dark matter charged again

We revisit constraints on dark matter that is charged under a U(1) gauge group in the dark sector, decoupled from Standard Model forces. We find that the strongest constraints in the literature are subject to a number of mitigating factors. For instance, the naive dark matter thermalization timescal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of cosmology and astroparticle physics Vol. 2017; no. 5; p. 22
Main Authors Agrawal, Prateek, Cyr-Racine, Francis-Yan, Randall, Lisa, Scholtz, Jakub
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 10.05.2017
Subjects
GALAXIES
GAUGE INVARIANCE
HEAT TRANSFER
MEAN FREE PATH
NONLUMINOUS MATTER
PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
SATURATION
SIMULATION
SPACE
STANDARD MODEL
STRONG INTERACTIONS
THERMALIZATION
U-1 GROUPS
VIABILITY
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Summary:We revisit constraints on dark matter that is charged under a U(1) gauge group in the dark sector, decoupled from Standard Model forces. We find that the strongest constraints in the literature are subject to a number of mitigating factors. For instance, the naive dark matter thermalization timescale in halos is corrected by saturation effects that slow down isotropization for modest ellipticities. The weakened bounds uncover interesting parameter space, making models with weak-scale charged dark matter viable, even with electromagnetic strength interaction. This also leads to the intriguing possibility that dark matter self-interactions within small dwarf galaxies are extremely large, a relatively unexplored regime in current simulations. Such strong interactions suppress heat transfer over scales larger than the dark matter mean free path, inducing a dynamical cutoff length scale above which the system appears to have only feeble interactions. These effects must be taken into account to assess the viability of darkly-charged dark matter. Future analyses and measurements should probe a promising region of parameter space for this model.
ISSN:1475-7516
1475-7516
DOI:10.1088/1475-7516/2017/05/022