2024/08/16 by R. Gustafson, Gustafson, R. Andrew, Gonzalo Herrera +7 · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.08947
openalex publication_date 2024/08/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.