Excluding Light Asymmetric Bosonic Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that neutron star observations place strong constraints on asymmetric bosonic dark matter, excluding certain mass ranges and interaction types, thereby narrowing the viable parameter space for dark matter models.

Contribution

It provides new astrophysical constraints on bosonic dark matter, including composite and self-interacting WIMPs, based on neutron star data, extending previous limits and covering a broad mass range.

Findings

Neutron star observations exclude bosonic dark matter from 2 keV to 16 GeV.

Constraints apply to composite fermionic WIMPs if compositeness scale exceeds 10^12 GeV.

Self-interacting bosonic WIMPs are constrained, complementing Bullet Cluster observations.

Abstract

We argue that current neutron star observations exclude asymmetric bosonic non-interacting dark matter in the range from 2 keV to 16 GeV, including the 5-15 GeV range favored by DAMA and CoGeNT. If bosonic WIMPs are composite of fermions, the same limits apply provided the compositeness scale is higher than ~10^12 GeV (for WIMP mass ~1 GeV). In case of repulsive self-interactions, we exclude large range of WIMP masses and interaction cross sections which complements the constraints imposed by observations of the Bullet Cluster.