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arxiv 1904.10000 v3 pith:73IBB767 submitted 2019-04-22 astro-ph.CO hep-ph

Constraints on Dark Matter Microphysics from the Milky Way Satellite Population

classification astro-ph.CO hep-ph
keywords dm-baryonscatteringlimitsmatterpopulationsatelliteuppercollisional
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Alternatives to the cold, collisionless dark matter (DM) paradigm in which DM behaves as a collisional fluid generically suppress small-scale structure. Herein we use the observed population of Milky Way (MW) satellite galaxies to constrain the collisional nature of DM, focusing on DM-baryon scattering. We first derive analytic upper limits on the velocity-independent DM-baryon scattering cross section by translating the upper bound on the lowest mass of halos inferred to host satellites into a characteristic cutoff scale in the linear matter power spectrum. We then confirm and improve these results through a detailed probabilistic inference of the MW satellite population that marginalizes over relevant astrophysical uncertainties. This yields $95\%$ confidence upper limits on the DM-baryon scattering cross section of $2\times10^{-29}\ \rm{cm}^2$ ($6\times 10^{-27}\ \rm{cm}^2$) for DM particle masses $m_\chi$ of~$10\ \rm{keV}$ ($10\ \rm{GeV}$); these limits scale as $m_\chi^{1/4}$ for $m_\chi \ll 1\ \rm{GeV}$ and $m_\chi$ for~$m_\chi \gg 1\ \rm{GeV}$. This analysis improves upon cosmological bounds derived from cosmic-microwave-background anisotropy measurements by multiple orders of magnitude over a wide range of DM masses, excluding regions of parameter space previously unexplored by other methods, including direct-detection experiments. Our work reveals a mapping between DM-baryon scattering and other alternative DM models, and we discuss the implications of our results for warm and fuzzy DM scenarios.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

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