Constraints on dark matter particles charged under a hidden gauge group from primordial black holes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how primordial black holes can constrain dark matter particles with hidden gauge charges, revealing limits on particle mass and charge-to-mass ratios based on black hole evolution.

Contribution

It provides novel constraints on dark matter particles with hidden gauge charges using primordial black hole evolution, a method not previously explored.

Findings

Particles with charge-to-mass ratio around one are incompatible with primordial black holes.

Heavy dark matter particles with very small charge-to-mass ratio are constrained.

No significant limits are found for particles with very high charge-to-mass ratio.

Abstract

In order to accommodate increasingly tighter observational constraints on dark matter, several models have been proposed recently in which dark matter particles are charged under some hidden gauge group. Hidden gauge charges are invisible for the standard model particles, hence such scenarios are very difficult to constrain directly. However black holes are sensitive to all gauge charges, whether they belong to the standard model or not. Here, we examine the constraints on the possible values of the dark matter particle mass and hidden gauge charge from the evolution of primordial black holes. We find that the existence of the primordial black holes with reasonable mass is incompatible with dark matter particles whose charge to mass ratio is of the order of one. For dark matter particles whose charge to mass ratio is much less than one, we are able to exclude only heavy dark matter in the mass range of 10^(11) GeV - 10^(16) GeV. Finally, for dark matter particles whose charge to mass ratio is much greater than one, there are no useful limits coming from primordial black holes.