Unitarity bounds and the cuspy halo problem.
Conventional cold dark matter cosmological models predict cuspy halos which are in apparent conflict with observations. We show that unitarity arguments imply interesting constraints on two proposals to address this problem: collisional dark matter and strongly annihilating dark matter. Efficient scattering in both implies m less, similar to 12 GeV and m less, similar to 25 GeV, respectively. We also show that the strong annihilation in the second scenario implies the presence of elastic scattering. Recent evidence suggests a collisional scenario where the cross section scales inversely with velocity--we argue superelastic processes are likely involved. Exceptions and implications for searches are discussed.
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Department of Physics, Columbia University, 538 West 120th Street, New York, New York 10027, USA. lhui@astro.columbia.edu