{"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/constraints-on-dark-matter-microphysics-from","title":"Constraints on Dark Matter Microphysics from the Milky Way Satellite Population","arxiv_id":"1904.10000","date":"2019-04-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ethan O. Nadler","Vera Gluscevic","Kimberly K. Boddy","Risa H. Wechsler"],"abstract":"Alternatives to the cold, collisionless dark matter (DM) paradigm in which DM behaves as a collisional fluid generically suppress small-scale structure. Herein we use the observed population of Milky Way (MW) satellite galaxies to constrain the collisional nature of DM, focusing on DM-baryon scattering. We first derive analytic upper limits on the velocity-independent DM-baryon scattering cross section by translating the upper bound on the lowest mass of halos inferred to host satellites into a characteristic cutoff scale in the linear matter power spectrum. We then confirm and improve these results through a detailed probabilistic inference of the MW satellite population that marginalizes over relevant astrophysical uncertainties. This yields $95\\%$ confidence upper limits on the DM-baryon scattering cross section of $2\\times10^{-29}\\ \\rm{cm}^2$ ($6\\times 10^{-27}\\ \\rm{cm}^2$) for DM particle masses $m_\\chi$ of~$10\\ \\rm{keV}$ ($10\\ \\rm{GeV}$); these limits scale as $m_\\chi^{1/4}$ for $m_\\chi \\ll 1\\ \\rm{GeV}$ and $m_\\chi$ for~$m_\\chi \\gg 1\\ \\rm{GeV}$. This analysis improves upon cosmological bounds derived from cosmic-microwave-background anisotropy measurements by multiple orders of magnitude over a wide range of DM masses, excluding regions of parameter space previously unexplored by other methods, including direct-detection experiments. Our work reveals a mapping between DM-baryon scattering and other alternative DM models, and we discuss the implications of our results for warm and fuzzy DM scenarios.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10000v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.10000v1.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":"constraints-on-dark-matter-microphysics-from","repo_url":"https://github.com/eonadler/DMBaryonScattering","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"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}