Constraints on Dark Matter Microphysics from the Milky Way Satellite Population

Abstract

Alternatives to the cold, collisionless dark matter (DM) paradigm in which DM behaves as a collisional fluid generically suppress small-scale structure. Herein we use the observed population of Milky Way (MW) satellite galaxies to constrain the collisional nature of DM, focusing on DM-baryon scattering. We first derive analytic upper limits on the velocity-independent DM-baryon scattering cross section by translating the upper bound on the lowest mass of halos inferred to host satellites into a characteristic cutoff scale in the linear matter power spectrum. We then confirm and improve these results through a detailed probabilistic inference of the MW satellite population that marginalizes over relevant astrophysical uncertainties. This yields $95\%$ confidence upper limits on the DM-baryon scattering cross section of $2\times 10^{-29}{\mathrm{cm}}^2$ ($6\times 10^{-27}{\mathrm{cm}}^2$) for DM particle masses $m_{\chi }$ of~$10\mathrm{keV}$ ($10\mathrm{GeV}$); these limits scale as $m_{\chi }^{1/4}$ for $m_{\chi }\ll 1\mathrm{GeV}$ and $m_{\chi }$ for~$m_{\chi }\gg 1\mathrm{GeV}$. This analysis improves upon cosmological bounds derived from cosmic-microwave-background anisotropy measurements by multiple orders of magnitude over a wide range of DM masses, excluding regions of parameter space previously unexplored by other methods, including direct-detection experiments. Our work reveals a mapping between DM-baryon scattering and other alternative DM models, and we discuss the implications of our results for warm and fuzzy DM scenarios.

Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures. Updated to reflect erratum due to an erroneous prefactor in our modified CLASS code that enhanced our cross section constraints by a factor of ~4 at all dark matter masses. Code available at http://github.com/eonadler/DMBaryonScattering