Indirect Probes of Dark Matter and Globular Cluster Properties From Dark Matter Annihilation within the Coolest White Dwarfs

TL;DR

This paper explores how the cooling of white dwarfs in globular clusters and dwarf galaxies can be used to detect or constrain dark matter properties and distribution, especially for low-mass dark matter particles.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to use white dwarf temperatures to constrain dark matter density and properties in astrophysical environments, improving existing limits significantly.

Findings

White dwarf temperatures can limit dark matter density in clusters.

Constraints on low-mass dark matter from white dwarf observations.

Potential to rule out dark matter halos in certain globular clusters.

Abstract

White Dwarfs (WD) capture Dark Matter (DM) as they orbit within their host halos. These captured particles may subsequently annihilate, heating the stellar core and preventing the WD from cooling. The potential wells of WDs are considerably deeper and core temperatures significantly cooler than those of main sequence stars. Consequently, DM evaporation is less important in WDs and DM with masses $M_{\chi} \gtrsim 100\, \kev$ and annihilation cross-sections orders of magnitude below the canonical thermal cross-section ($\sigmav \gtrsim 10^{-46}\, \cm^3$/s) can significantly alter WD cooling in particular astrophysical environments. We consider WDs in globular clusters (GCs) and dwarf galaxies. If the parameters of the DM particle are known, then the temperature of the coolest WD in a GC can be used to constrain the DM density of the cluster's halo (potentially even ruling out the presence of a halo if the inferred density is of order the ambient Galactic density). Recently several direct detection experiments have seen signals whose origins might be due to low mass DM. In this paper, we show that if these claims from CRESST, DAMA, CDMS-Si, and CoGeNT could be interpreted as DM, then observations of NGC 6397 limit the fraction of DM in that cluster to be $f_{\mathrm{DM}} \lesssim 10^{-3}$. This would be an improvement over existing constraints of 3 orders of magnitude and clearly rule out a significant DM halo for this cluster...