Speaker
Takuya Okawa
(SISSA)
Description
Dark matter capture by celestial objects is a powerful method to detect dark matter indirectly. We evaluate conditions on the dark matter annihilation cross section to achieve the commonly assumed situation, capture-annihilation equilibrium, and check its consistency with being thermal relic dark matter, unitarity bounds, and cosmological bounds. We also consider dark matter particles that annihilate to mediators, which subsequently decay to detectable particles after escaping from the celestial body. We then examine requirements on a mediator mass and coupling for this scenario to be viable. Lastly, we quantify the strength of dark matter self-interactions in this scenario and compare it to current bounds from astrophysics.
Author
Takuya Okawa
(SISSA)
Co-authors
Gordan Krnjaic
(Fermilab)
Hongwan Liu
Joshua Foster