Abstract
Cold gas clouds recently discovered hundreds of parsecs from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy have the potential to detect dark matter. With a detailed treatment of gas cloud microphysical interactions, we determine Galactic Center gas cloud temperatures, unbound electron abundances, atomic ionization fractions, heating rates, and cooling rates and find how these quantities vary with metallicity. Considering a number of different dark sector heating mechanisms, we set new bounds on ultralight dark photon dark matter for masses , vector portal dark matter coupled through a sub–mega electron volt mass boson, and up to mass dark matter that interacts with baryons.
- Received 11 January 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.023001
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society