Speaker
Description
Strongly self-interacting dark matter (SSIDM) was proposed as a candidate which might be able to solve astrophysical problems plaguing collisionless cold dark matter: the cusp-vs-core, the missing satellite and the too-big-to-fail problems. These SSIDM particles can in principle form bound states. In particular, if the SSIDM particles belong to a confining gauge group, the singlet states (similar to the baryons of QCD but whose spin depends on the gauge group), the so-called dark "baryons", can cluster into astronomical compact objects which will be called Dark Astronomical Extreme Compact Objects (DAECO) in this paper. How massive can they be? What are their typical sizes? Depending on the mass of the dark baryon, a DAECO can be as "large" as 33 Earth mass for a 1-TeV dark baryon to 0.3 Earth mass for a 10-TeV dark baryon. These DAECOs are extremely small: 15 cm for the 33-Earth mass DAECO and 1.5 mm for the 0.3-Earth mass one. These planetary-mass-type DAECO’S could be "detected" for using techniques such as the astrometric measurements as applied to the searches for exoplanets. Specifically, one would look for gravitational influences of DAECOS’s on a given star when they come lose to it. The search for DAECO’s, if they exist, would provide a "direct" detection of strongly self-interacting dark matter at an astronomical level, somewhat similar to laboratory direct detection searches through the detection of nuclear recoil. Another possibility is the merger of two clusters of DAECOs with each having a mass ∼ 30 M generating gravitational waves of the types observed by LIGO.
