Speaker
Description
Light mediators in the dark sector can give rise to dark matter self-interactions. Looking beyond minimal models of self-interacting dark matter that typically only have elastic interactions, there is growing interest in dissipative dark sectors, which can significantly modify the evolution of dark matter halos through inelastic processes. We consider an inelastic dark matter model made up by a fermion and a light U(1) gauge boson, and assume that the fermion splits into two states due to a Majorana mass term. We obtain cross sections for the relevant dark sector interactions by solving the two-state Schrödinger equation, which we then use to simulate the gravothermal collapse of dark matter halos. Finally, we demonstrate how one can place constraints on the allowed parameter space of the underlying dark matter model by comparing with constraints on the self-interaction cross section from galactic observations.