Detecting Composite Dark Matter with Long Range and Contact Interactions in Gas Clouds

Abstract

Cold interstellar gas clouds provide an exciting new method to discover dark matter. Their immense size makes them uniquely sensitive to interactions from the heaviest, most rarefied dark matter models. Using gas cloud observations, we derive constraints on heavy composite dark matter coupled to the Standard Model through a light dark photon for dark matter up to a thousand solar masses. We find gas clouds are also sensitive to very large composite dark matter that interacts with nuclei through a fixed contact interaction cross section. We also study the contact interaction model and implement multiscatter and overburden analyses to obtain bounds from experiments like CDMS, CRESST, DAMA, XQC, and XENON1T.