[W174] Jaime Hoefken: Dark Matter Interactions in White Dwarfs – A Multi-Energy Approach to Capture Mechanisms
Latin American Webinars on Physics
White dwarfs offer a compelling avenue for probing interactions of dark matter particles, particularly in the challenging sub-GeV mass regime. The constraints derived from these celestial objects strongly depend on the existence of high dark matter densities in the corresponding regions of the Universe, where white dwarfs are observed. This implies that excluding the parameter space using local white dwarfs would present a significant challenge, primarily due to the low dark matter density in the solar neighborhood. This limitation prompts the exploration of alternative scenarios involving dark matter particles with a diverse spectrum of kinetic energies.
In this talk it will be shown how these dark matter particles traverse the star, interact with stellar matter, and ultimately get captured. It will be assumed that fermionic dark matter interacts with stellar matter either through a broken U(1) gauge vector mediator or a scalar. In the computations, it is considered how interactions might vary across different energy regimes, from high-energy deep inelastic scattering and inelastic scatterings via the production of N- and Δ- resonances to lower-energy elastic interactions with nucleons and nuclei.