Some potential problems of OHe composite dark matter

Understand

Among composite-dark-matter scenarios, one of the simplest and most predictive is that of O-helium (OHe) dark atoms, in which a lepton-like doubly charged particle O is bound with a primordial helium nucleus, and is the main constituent of dark matter.

• This model liberates the physics of dark matter from many unknown features of new physics, and it demands a deep understanding of the details of known nuclear and atomic physics, which are still somewhat unclear in the case of nuclear interacting "atomic" shells.
• So far the model has relied on the dominance of elastic scattering of OHe with the matter.
• In view of the uncertainty in our understanding of OHe interaction with nuclei we study the opposite scenario, in which inelastic nuclear reactions dominate the OHe interactions with nuclei.