Exploring Supermassive Compact Dark Matter with the Millilensing Effect of Gamma-Ray Bursts

TL;DR

This study investigates the abundance of supermassive compact dark matter objects in the mass range of 10^5 to 10^7 solar masses using millilensed gamma-ray bursts, employing hierarchical Bayesian inference to analyze observational data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to estimate supermassive compact dark matter abundance from GRB millilensing candidates and discusses implications for dark matter models.

Findings

Estimated dark matter abundance: f_CO=10^-1.60.

Tension with other observational constraints.

Potential identification of a lensed GRB event.

Abstract

Gravitational lensing effect is one of most significant observational probes to investigate compact dark matter/objects over a wide mass range. In this work, we first propose to derive the population information and the abundance of supermassive compact dark matter in the mass range $\sim10^5-10^7~M_{\odot}$ from 6 millilensed gamma-ray burst (GRB) candidates in 3000 Fermi GRB events using the hierarchical Bayesian inference method. We obtain that, for the mass range $\sim10^5-10^7~M_{\odot}$, the abundance of supermassive compact dark matter is $f_{\rm CO}=10^{-1.60}$ in the log-normal mass distribution scenario. This result is in obvious tension with some other observational constraints, e.g. ultra-faint dwarfs and dynamical friction. However, it also was argued that there is only one system in these 6 candidates has been identified as lensed GRB event with fairly high confidence. In this case, the tension would be significantly alleviated. Therefore, it would be an interesting clue for both the millilensed GRB identification and the formation mechanism of supermassive compact dark matter.