Dark Matter Bound States from Three-Body Recombination

Abstract

The small-scale structure problems of the universe can be solved by self-interacting dark matter that becomes strongly interacting at low energies. A particularly predictive model is resonant short-range self-interactions, with a dark-matter mass of about 19 GeV and a large S-wave scattering length of about 17 fm. Such a model makes definite predictions for the few-body physics of weakly bound clusters of the dark-matter particles. We calculate the production of two-body bound clusters by three-body recombination in the early universe under the assumption that the dark matter particles are identical bosons, which is the most favorable case for forming larger clusters. The fraction of dark matter in the form of two-body bound clusters can increase by as much as 4 orders of magnitude when the dark-matter temperature falls below the binding energy, but its present value remains less than $10^{-6}$.