Making Asymmetric Dark Matter Gold: Early Universe Synthesis of Nuggets

Understand

We compute the mass function of bound states of Asymmetric Dark Matter--nuggets--synthesized in the early Universe.

• We apply our results for the nugget density and binding energy computed from a nuclear model to obtain analytic estimates of the typical nugget size exiting synthesis.
• We numerically solve the Boltzmann equation for synthesis including two-to-two fusion reactions, estimating the impact of bottlenecks on the mass function exiting synthesis.
• These results provide the basis for studying the late Universe cosmology of nuggets in a future companion paper.