Abstract
Cold interstellar gas clouds provide an exciting new method to discover dark matter. Their immense size makes them uniquely sensitive to interactions from the heaviest, most rarefied dark matter models. Using gas cloud observations, we derive constraints on heavy composite dark matter coupled to the Standard Model through a light dark photon for dark matter up to a thousand solar masses. We find gas clouds are also sensitive to very large composite dark matter that interacts with nuclei through a fixed contact interaction cross section. We also study the contact interaction model and implement multiscatter and overburden analyses to obtain bounds from experiments like CDMS, CRESST, DAMA, XQC, and XENON1T.
Highlights
Cosmological observations and galactic dynamics have established that dark matter provides the bulk of matter in our Universe
We have found that interstellar gas clouds can be repurposed as exquisitely sensitive calorimetric detectors in the hunt for heavy composite dark matter
Cold gas clouds are sensitive to models of composite dark matter that interact through a long-range force or through a contact interaction with a cross section in excess of a nuclear cross section
Summary
There is a vast body of literature investigating weakly interacting particle dark matter ( known as WIMPs) with a mass near that of the proton, comparatively less is known about heavier dark matter. It has been clear since the first proposal of quark droplet dark matter [1], and more recent composite dark matter models [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17], that dark matter may be a rather heavy composite state. We will find that cold gas clouds in our Milky Way Galaxy provide unparalleled sensitivity to composite dark matter models. In the Appendix, we present a summary of bounds on composite dark matter’s contact interactions from a search for tracks in mica and Skylab’s plastic etch detectors
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