| Speaker: | Po-Yen Tseng (Yonsei University) |
|---|---|
| Title: | Heating neutron stars with GeV dark matter |
| Date (JST): | Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 13:30 - 14:30 |
| Place: | Seminar Room A |
| Related File: | 2458.pdf |
| Abstract: |
An old neutron star may capture halo dark matter and get heated up by the deposited kinetic energy, thus behaving like a thermal DM detector with sensitivity to a wide range of DM masses and a variety of DM-quark interactions. Near future infrared telescopes will measure NS temperatures down to a few thousand Kelvin and probe NS heating by DM capture. We focus on GeV-mass Dirac fermion DM in scenarios in which the DM capture rate can reach the geometric limit. For concreteness, we study (1) a model that invokes dark decays of the neutron to explain the neutron lifetime anomaly, and (2) a framework of DM coupled to quarks through a vector current portal. In the neutron dark decay model a NS can have a substantial DM population, so that the DM capture rate can reach the geometric limit through DM self-interactions even if the DM-neutron scattering cross section is tiny. |
