Exploring the astrophysics of dark atoms

TL;DR

This paper investigates a dark matter model composed of dark atoms, showing that such a sector could influence galactic structures and is constrained by astrophysical observations, contrasting previous assumptions of dark disk formation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a dark atomic sector can significantly affect galaxy formation and structure, providing new constraints and contrasting prior models predicting dark disks.

Findings

Dark atomic dark matter can lead to spheroidal structures rather than disks.

Dark atoms tend to form dense clumps similar to baryonic fragmentation.

Astrophysical observations strongly constrain the viable parameter space for dark atomic matter.

Abstract

A component of the dark matter could consist of two darkly charged particles with a large mass ratio and a massless force carrier. This `atomic' dark sector could behave much like the baryonic sector, cooling and fragmenting down to stellar-mass or smaller scales. Past studies have shown that cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure constraints rule out $\gtrsim 5\%$ of the dark matter to behave in this manner. However, we show that, even with percent level mass fractions, a dark atomic sector could affect some extragalactic and galactic observables. We track the cooling and merger history of an atomic dark component for much of the interesting parameter space. Unlike the baryons, where stellar feedback (driven by nuclear physics) delays the formation and growth of galaxies, cooling dark atomic gas typically results in disks forming earlier, leaving more time for their destruction via mergers. Rather than disks in Milky Way sized halos, we find the end product is typically spheroidal structures on galactic scales or dark atom fragments distributed on halo scales. This result contrasts with previous studies, which had assumed that the dark atoms would result in dark disks. Furthermore the dark atoms condense into dense clumps, analogous to how the baryons fragment on solar-mass scales. We estimate the size of these dark clumps, and use these estimates to show that viable atomic dark matter parameter space is ruled out by stellar microlensing, by the half-light radii of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, and by Milky Way mass-to-light inferences.