1201.2400 (Tolga Guver et al.)

On the capture of dark matter by neutron stars    [PDF]

Tolga Guver, Arif Emre Erkoca, Mary Hall Reno, Ina Sarcevic

We calculate the number of dark matter particles that a neutron star accumulates over its lifetime as it rotates around the center of the Galaxy, when the dark matter particle is a self-interacting boson but does not self-annihilate. We take into account dark matter interactions with baryonic matter. We show that dark matter self-interactions play an important role in the rapid accumulation of dark matter in the core of the neutron star and its collapse. For the case when the dark matter density is 1 GeV/cm^3 and the dark matter self-interaction cross section is 10^{-24} cm^2, the observation of a typical neutron star implies strong limits on the dark matter-nucleon cross section for a broad range of dark matter masses. We determine the excluded region of the parameter space for dark matter mass and dark matter interaction cross sections based on the observation of old neutron stars. We discuss the dependence on dark matter density. We show that for a dark matter density of 10^3 GeV/cm^3, the constraint on the dark matter self-interaction cross section is several orders of magnitude stronger than the current Bullet Cluster limit.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2400