Cold Gas Clouds as Dark Matter Detectors
Fatemeh Elahi (IPM, Tehran)

A few hundred cold gas clouds were recently discovered, each situated a few hundred parsecs from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. These gas clouds can provide unprecedented sensitivity to dark matter-standard model interactions. The main physical basis is simple: dark matter tends to have a higher temperature than the coldest interstellar and intergalactic gas. Therefore, dark matter can heat the gas to higher-than-observed temperatures, if dark matter interacts enough with baryons or electrons in the gas cloud. In this talk, I will discuss the bounds cold gas clouds give on ultra-light dark photon, vector portal, and millicharged dark matter.