Making Asymmetric Dark Matter Gold: Early Universe Synthesis of Nuggets

TL;DR

This paper models the early Universe formation of asymmetric dark matter nuggets, calculating their mass distribution and synthesis dynamics to inform future cosmological studies.

Contribution

It introduces a nuclear-model-based analytic framework for predicting dark matter nugget sizes and numerically solves Boltzmann equations to understand synthesis bottlenecks.

Findings

Derived the mass function of dark matter nuggets.

Estimated typical nugget sizes after synthesis.

Analyzed the impact of fusion bottlenecks on nugget formation.

Abstract

We compute the mass function of bound states of Asymmetric Dark Matter--nuggets--synthesized in the early Universe. We apply our results for the nugget density and binding energy computed from a nuclear model to obtain analytic estimates of the typical nugget size exiting synthesis. We numerically solve the Boltzmann equation for synthesis including two-to-two fusion reactions, estimating the impact of bottlenecks on the mass function exiting synthesis. These results provide the basis for studying the late Universe cosmology of nuggets in a future companion paper.