Strong constraints on decay and annihilation of dark matter from heating of gas-rich dwarf galaxies
Digvijay Wadekar, Zihui Wang
备注：
11+4 pages, 7 figures. Version appearing in PRD. Added more conservative estimates of DM limits and a discussion of senstivity of the limits to DM halo model. The code associated with this paper is available at https://github.com/JayWadekar/Gas_rich_dwarfs
Gas-rich dwarf galaxies located outside the virial radius of their host are relatively pristine systems and have ultra-low gas cooling rates. This makes them very sensitive to heat injection by annihilation or decay of dark matter (DM). Such dwarfs are particularly sensitive to DM producing e$^\pm$ with energies 1$-$100 MeV or photons with energies 13.6 eV$-1$ keV, because these products can be efficiently thermalized in the neutral hydrogen gas of the dwarfs. Following the methodology of Wadekar and Farrar (2021), we require the rate of heat injection by DM to not exceed the ultra-low radiative cooling rate of gas in the Leo T dwarf galaxy. This gives model-independent bounds on $(i)$ the decay lifetime of DM to $e^\pm$ (photons) which are stronger than all the previous literature for $m_\mathrm{DM}\sim$ 1$-$10 MeV ($m_\mathrm{DM}\sim0.02-1$ keV), $(ii)$ annihilation of DM to $e^{\pm}$ comparable to constraints from CMB and X/$γ$-ray surveys. We also translate our bounds for the case of the following DM models: axion-like particles (ALPs), sterile neutrinos, excited DM states, higgs portal scalars and dark baryons. Observations of gas-rich low-mass dwarfs from upcoming 21cm and optical surveys can therefore be powerful probes of a multitude of models of DM.
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The observed galactic 511 keV line has been interpreted in a number of papers as a possible signal of dark matter annihilation within the galactic bulge. If this is the case then we should expect a similar spectral feature associated with nearby dwarf galaxies which are dark matter dominated. It has recently been argued [1] that the absence of such a signal excludes a dark matter explanation as the major source for the galactic 511 keV line. In the model presented here dark matter in the form of heavy quark nuggets produces the galactic 511 keV emission line through interactions with the visib…
Recent X-ray observations revealed that strong cooling flow of intracluster gas is not present in galaxy clusters, even though predicted theoretically if there is no additional heating source. I show that relativistic particles produced by dark matter neutralino annihilation in cluster cores provide a sufficient heating source to suppress the cooling flow, under reasonable astrophysical circumstances including adiabatic growth of central density profile, with appropriate particle physics parameters for dark matter neutralinos. In contrast to other astrophysical heat sources such as AGNs, this …
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A dark force can impact the cosmological history of dark matter (DM), both explaining observed cores in dwarf galaxies and setting the DM relic density through annihilation to dark force bosons. For GeV - TeV DM mass, DM self-scattering in dwarf galaxy halos exhibits quantum mechanical resonances, analogous to a Sommerfeld enhancement for annihilation. We show that a simple model of DM with a dark force can accommodate all astrophysical bounds on self-interactions in halos and explain the observed relic density, through a single coupling constant.
Towards the end of brane inflation, the brane pair annihilation produces massive closed strings. The transfer of this energy to Standard Model (SM) open string modes depends on where the SM branes and the brane annihilation are located: in the bulk, in the same throat or in different throats. We find that, in all cases as long as the brane annihilation and the SM branes are not both in the bulk, the transfer of energy to start the hot big bang epoch can be efficient enough to be compatible with big bang nucleosynthesis. The suppression of the abundance of the graviton and its Kaluza-Klein (KK)…
