Terrestrial and Martian Heat Flow Limits on Dark Matter

Understand

If dark matter is efficiently captured by a planet, energy released in its annihilation can exceed that planet's total heat output.

• Building on prior work, we treat Earth's composition and dark matter capture in detail and present improved limits on dark matter-nucleon scattering cross sections for dark matter masses ranging from 0.1 to $10^{10}$ GeV.
• We also extend Earth limits by applying the same treatment to Mars.
• The scope of dark matter models considered is expanded to include spin-dependent nuclear interactions including isospin-independent, proton only, and neutron only interactions.