2013/09/30 by Bridget Bertoni, Ann E. Nelson, Sanjay Reddy · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.88.123505
published as Phys. Rev. D. 88, 123505 (2013) · 27 pages, 6 figures. v2: a few comments added, typos fixed--matches published version
arxiv created 2013/11/13 · arxiv updated 2015/06/17
We study how many-body effects alter the dark matter (DM) thermalization time inside neutron stars. We find that Pauli blocking, kinematic constraints, and superfluidity and superconductivity in the neutron star significantly affect the DM thermalization time, in general lengthening it. This could change the final DM mass and DM-nucleon cross section constraints by considering black hole formation in neutron stars due to DM accretion. We consider the class of models in which DM is an asymmetric, complex scalar particle with a mass between 1 keV and 5 GeV which couples to regular matter via some heavy vector boson. Interestingly, we find that the discovery of asymmetric, bosonic DM could motivate the existence of exotic neutron star cores. We apply our results to the case of mixed sneutrino DM.