Constraints on self-interaction cross-sections of dark matter in universal bound states from direct detection

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the formation of dark matter bound states, called darkonium, affects direct detection experiments and derives constraints on dark matter self-interactions, addressing small-scale structure issues in cosmology.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to constrain dark matter self-interaction cross-sections via darkonium effects in direct detection data, linking particle physics with astrophysical observations.

Findings

Bounds on the inverse scattering length gamma are established.

Constraints on dark matter self-interaction cross-sections are derived.

Results are compared with astrophysical and simulation-based limits.

Abstract

Lambda- Cold Dark Matter (LambdaCDM) has been successful at explaining the large-scale structures in the universe but faces severe issues on smaller scales when compared to observations. Introducing self-interactions between dark matter particles claims to provide a solution to the small-scale issues in the LambdaCDM simulations while being consistent with the observations at large scales. The existence of the energy region in which these self-interactions between dark matter particles come close to saturating the S-wave unitarity bound can result in the formation of dark matter bound states called darkonium. In this scenario, all the low energy scattering properties are determined by a single parameter, the inverse scattering length gamma. In this work, we set bounds on gamma by studying the impact of darkonium on the observations at direct detection experiments using data from CRESST-III and XENON1T. The exclusion limits on gamma are then subsequently converted to exclusion limits on the self-interaction cross-section and compared with the constraints from astrophysics and N-body simulations.