{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/bounds-on-velocity-dependent-dark-matter","title":"Bounds on velocity-dependent dark matter-proton scattering from Milky Way satellite abundance","arxiv_id":"2010.02936","date":"2020-10-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Karime Maamari","Vera Gluscevic","Kimberly K. Boddy","Ethan O. Nadler","Risa H. Wechsler"],"abstract":"We use the latest measurements of the Milky Way satellite population from the Dark Energy Survey and Pan-STARRS1 to infer the most stringent astrophysical bound to date on velocity-dependent interactions between dark matter particles and protons. We model the momentum-transfer cross section as a power law of the relative particle velocity $v$ with a free normalizing amplitude, $\\sigma_\\text{MT}=\\sigma_0 v^n$, to broadly capture the interactions arising within the non-relativistic effective theory of dark matter-proton scattering. The scattering leads to a momentum and heat transfer between the baryon and dark matter fluids in the early Universe, ultimately erasing structure on small physical scales and reducing the abundance of low-mass halos that host dwarf galaxies today. From the consistency of observations with the cold collisionless dark matter paradigm, using a new method that relies on the most robust predictions of the linear perturbation theory, we infer an upper limit on $\\sigma_0$ of $1.4\\times10^{-23}$, $2.1\\times10^{-19}$, and $1.0\\times10^{-12}\\ \\mathrm{cm}^2$, for interaction models with $n=2,4,6$, respectively, for a dark matter particle mass of $10\\ \\mathrm{MeV}$. These results improve observational limits on dark matter--proton scattering by orders of magnitude and thus provide an important guide for viable sub-GeV dark matter candidates.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02936v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.02936v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"bounds-on-velocity-dependent-dark-matter","repo_url":"https://github.com/maamari/VelocityDependentLimits","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}