Abstract
It was recently demonstrated that asymmetric dark matter can ignite supernovae by collecting and collapsing inside lone sub-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarfs, and that this may be the cause of Type Ia supernovae. A ball of asymmetric dark matter accumulated inside a white dwarf and collapsing under its own weight sheds enough gravitational potential energy through scattering with nuclei to spark the fusion reactions that precede a Type Ia supernova explosion. In this article we elaborate on this mechanism and use it to place new bounds on interactions between nucleons and asymmetric dark matter for masses . Interestingly, we find that for dark matter more massive than , Type Ia supernova ignition can proceed through the Hawking evaporation of a small black hole formed by the collapsed dark matter. We also identify how a cold white dwarf’s Coulomb crystal structure substantially suppresses dark matter–nuclear scattering at low momentum transfers, which is crucial for calculating the time it takes dark matter to form a black hole. Higgs and vector portal dark matter models that ignite Type Ia supernovae are explored.
- Received 27 May 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.043020
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