Improved Treatment of Bosonic Dark Matter Dynamics in Neutron Stars: Consequences and Constraints

Understand

It is conceivable that a bosonic dark matter (DM) with non-gravitational interactions with SM particles will be accumulated at the center of a neutron star (NS) and can lead to black hole formation.

• In contrast to previous works with a fixed NS temperature, we dynamically determine the formation of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) for a given set of DM parameters, namely the DM-neutron scattering cross-section ($\sigma_{\chi n}$), the thermal average of DM annihilation cross-section ($\langle\sigma v\rangle$) and the DM mass ($m_\chi$).
• For both non-annihilating and annihilating DM with $\langle\sigma v \rangle \lesssim 10^{-26}{~\rm cm^3~ s^{-1}}$, the BEC forms for $m_\chi \lesssim 10$ TeV.
• In case of non-annihilating DM, observations of old NS allows $\sigma_{\chi n}\lesssim 10^{-52}~{\rm cm^2}$ for $10 {~\rm MeV} \leq m_{\chi} \lesssim 10 {~\rm GeV}$ (with BEC) and $\sigma_{\chi n}\lesssim 10^{-47}~{\rm cm^2}$ for $5 {~\rm TeV} \lesssim m_\chi \lesssim 30 {~\rm PeV} $ (without BEC).