2022/10/04 by Joseph Bramante, Jason Kumar, Bramante, Joseph +7 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.01812
We present, for the first time, a complete treatment of strongly-interacting dark matter capture in planets, taking Earth as an example. We focus on light dark matter and the heating of Earth by dark matter annihilation, addressing a number of crucial dynamical processes which have been overlooked, such as the "ping-pong effect" during dark matter capture. We perform full Monte-Carlo simulations and obtain improved bounds on strongly-interacting dark matter from Earth heating and direct detection experiments for both spin-independent and spin-dependent interactions, while also allowing for the interacting species to make up a sub-component of the cosmological dark matter.