Speaker
Description
Neutron stars harbour matter under extreme conditions, providing a unique testing ground for fundamental interactions.
Dark matter can be captured by neutron stars via scattering, where kinetic energy is transferred to the star.
This can have a number of observational consequences, such as theheating of old neutron stars to infra-red temperatures.
Previous treatments of the capture process have employed various approximation or simplifications.
We present here an improved treatment of dark matter capture, valid for a wide dark matter mass range, that correctly incorporates all relevant physical effects.
We provide general expressions that enable the exact capture rate to be calculated numerically, and derive simplified expressions that are valid for particular interaction types or mass regimes and that greatly increase the computational efficiency.
We find that the potential neutron star sensitivity to DM-lepton scattering cross sections greatly exceeds electron-recoil experiments, particularly in the sub-GeV regime, with a sensitivity to sub-MeV DM well beyond the reach of future terrestrial experiments.
We present results for DM-Baryons scatterings in Neutron stars, were the sensitivity is expected to greatly exceed current DD experiments for the spin-dependent case in the whole masse range, and for spin-independent in the low and high mass range.
