Some potential problems of OHe composite dark matter

TL;DR

This paper examines potential issues with the OHe composite dark matter model, especially focusing on inelastic nuclear reactions that could lead to overabundance of anomalous isotopes, challenging its viability.

Contribution

It investigates the consequences of inelastic interactions in the OHe dark matter model, revealing possible formation of anomalous isotopes that pose problems for the model's consistency.

Findings

Inelastic nuclear reactions lead to O-beryllium ion formation.

Such ions could cause overabundance of anomalous isotopes.

This challenges the assumptions of the OHe dark matter model.

Abstract

Among composite-dark-matter scenarios, one of the simplest and most predictive is that of O-helium (OHe) dark atoms, in which a lepton-like doubly charged particle O is bound with a primordial helium nucleus, and is the main constituent of dark matter. This model liberates the physics of dark matter from many unknown features of new physics, and it demands a deep understanding of the details of known nuclear and atomic physics, which are still somewhat unclear in the case of nuclear interacting "atomic" shells. So far the model has relied on the dominance of elastic scattering of OHe with the matter. In view of the uncertainty in our understanding of OHe interaction with nuclei we study the opposite scenario, in which inelastic nuclear reactions dominate the OHe interactions with nuclei. We show that in this case all the OHe atoms bind with extra He nuclei, forming doubly charged O-beryllium ions, which behave like anomalous helium, causing potential problems with overabundance of anomalous isotopes in terrestrial matter.