Charge Constraints of Macroscopic Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates macroscopic dark matter candidates, focusing on charged macros and their observable signals, to constrain their properties based on the absence of expected interactions across various scales.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing Coulomb interactions of charged macros, deriving new constraints from observational non-detections.

Findings

Charged macros would produce detectable signals if abundant.

Observations exclude certain mass and charge ranges for macros.

Coulomb interactions significantly impact macro detectability.

Abstract

Macroscopic dark matter (macros) refers to a broad class of alternative candidates to particle dark matter with still unprobed regions of parameter space. Prior work on macros has considered elastic scattering to be the dominant energy transfer mechanism in deriving constraints on the abundance of macros for some range of masses $M_x$ and (geometric) cross-sections $\sigma_x$ However, macros with a significant amount of electric charge would, through Coulomb interactions, interact strongly enough to have produced observable signals on terrestrial, galactic and cosmological scales. We determine the expected signals and constrain the corresponding regions of parameter space, based on the lack of these signals in observations.