Dark Matter Macroscopic Pearls, 3.55 keV X-ray line, How big ?

TL;DR

This paper proposes a model of dark matter composed of macroscopic vacuum bubbles called pearls, which can explain the 3.55 keV X-ray line and other astrophysical observations through collisions and de-excitation processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel macroscopic pearl dark matter model with two size variants, explaining multiple astrophysical phenomena and experimental signals.

Findings

The model fits the 3.55 keV X-ray line from galaxy centers and clusters.

Small pearls can account for the Tycho supernova remnant X-ray line.

The model can potentially explain DAMA-LIBRA and Xenon1T signals.

Abstract

We study the 3.55 keV X-ray suspected to arise from dark matter in our model of dark matter consisting of a bubble of a new phase of the vacuum, the surface tension of which keeps ordinary matter under high pressure inside the bubble. We consider two versions of the model: Old large pearls model : We worked for a long time on a pearl picture with pearl / bubbles of cm-size adjusted so that the impacts of them on earth could be identified with events of the mysterious type that happened in Tunguska in 1908. We fit both the very frequency, the 3.55 keV, and the overall intensity of the X-ray line coming from the center of the Milky Way and from galaxy clusters with one parameter in the model in which this radiation comes from collisions of pearls. New small pearl model: Our latest idea is to let the pearls be smaller than atoms but bigger than nuclei so as to manage to fit the 3.5 keV X-rays coming from the Tycho supernova remnant in which Jeltema and Profumo observed this line. Further we also crudely fit the DAMA-LIBRA observation with the small pearls, and even see a possibility for including the electron-recoil-excess seen by the Xenon1T experiment as being due to de-excitation via electron emission of our pearls. The important point of even our small size pearl model is that the cross section of our "macroscopic" pearls is so large that the pearls interact several times in the shielding but, due to their much larger mass than the typical nuclei, are {\bf not stopped by only a few interactions}. Nevertheless only a minute fraction of the relatively strongly interacting pearls reach the 1400 m down to the DAMA experiment, but due to the higher cross section we can fit the data anyway.