Cosmological implications of electromagnetically interacting dark matter: milli-charged particles and atoms with singly and doubly charged dark matter

TL;DR

This paper explores models of electromagnetically interacting dark matter, including milli-charged particles and charged dark atoms, analyzing their formation, stability, and effects on cosmological observables like the CMB and matter power spectrum.

Contribution

It introduces detailed models of dark matter with electromagnetic interactions and incorporates these into the CLASS code to derive observational constraints from Planck data.

Findings

HeD atoms behave like standard bcdmbcdm for certain scales

CMB data constrains the fraction of milli-charged particles to less than 1%

Dark atoms with heavier constituents are less constrained by CMB observations

Abstract

While the behavior of the dominant component of the dark matter is reasonably well established by cosmological observables, its particle nature and interactions with the rest of the matter are not known. We consider three dark matter models that admit electromagnetic interaction between baryons and dark matter: (a) milli-charged particle (CCDM) of charge $q_{\rm ccdm}$ and mass $m_{\rm ccdm}$, (b) a neutral atom of two charged particles of mass $m_{\rm dd}$ (DD), and (c) a neutral atom of doubly charged particle and helium nucleus (HeD). We derive and discuss in detail the formation, stability, and interaction of these atoms with baryons. We derive the implications of this new interaction in the tight-coupling approximation, which allows us to analytically gauge their impact on the matter power spectrum and CMB anisotropy. We incorporate this new interaction into the publicly-available code CLASS to obtain numerical results. We compare our results with Planck 2018 data to constrain the fraction of interacting dark matter. For the range of allowed astrophysical parameters, the HeD atom yields the results of $\Lambda$CDM model for $k < 1 \, \rm Mpc^{-1}$, and hence its fraction is not constrained by CMB anisotropy data which is sensitive to $k < 0.2 \, \rm Mpc^{-1}$. For $m_{\rm dd} \gtrsim 25 \, \rm GeV$, the DD atom is also not constrained by CMB data. For $m_{\rm dd} = 10 \, \rm GeV$, the CMB data constrains the fraction of DD atoms to be smaller than 4% of the total CDM component. For $q_{\rm ccdm} = 10^{-6}e$ and $m_{\rm ccdm} = 50 \, \rm MeV$, the CCDM fraction is constrained to be less than 1%.