Direct search constraints on very heavy dark skyrmions

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In the standard dark matter creation scenario, dark matter arises from freeze-out due to decoupling from the thermal heat bath in the early universe. On the other hand, topological solitons can also emerge during phase transitions through the Kibble–Zurek mechanism or through bubble nucleation. In particular, Murayama and Shu found that the Kibble–Zurek mechanism can produce topological defects up to about 10 PeV, and Bramante et al. had recently pointed out that direct search constraints can be extrapolated to very large masses. Motivated by these observations, we examine direct search constraints for PeV scale dark skyrmions with a Higgs portal coupling to baryons. We find abundance constraints on the combination g_V^2M_S of Skyrme coupling g_V and skyrmion mass M_S. We also find that extrapolation of the direct search constraints from XENON1T to very high masses constrains the combination g_{wh}/g_V^4 as a function of M_S, where g_{wh} is the Higgs portal coupling of the dark skyrmions.