Dark Matter's secret liaisons: phenomenology of a dark U(1) sector with bound states

Understand

Dark matter (DM) charged under a dark U(1) force appears in many extensions of the Standard Model, and has been invoked to explain anomalies in cosmic-ray data, as well as a self-interacting DM candidate.

• In this paper, we perform a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of such a model, assuming that the DM abundance arises from the thermal freeze-out of the dark interactions.
• We include, for the first time, bound-state effects both in the DM production and in the indirect detection signals, and quantify their importance for Fermi, AMS, and CMB experiments.
• We find that DM in the mass range 1 GeV to 100 TeV, annihilating into dark photons of MeV to GeV mass, is in conflict with observations.