Constraints on the Interaction between Dark Matter and Baryons from Cooling Flow Clusters

Other nongravitational heating processes are needed to resolve the disagreement between the absence of cool gas components in the centers of galaxy clusters revealed recently by Chandra and XMM observations and the expectations of conventional radiative cooling models. We propose that the interaction between dark matter and baryonic matter may act as an alternative for the reheating of intracluster medium (ICM) in the inner regions of clusters, in which kinetic energy of dark matter is transported to ICM to balance radiative cooling. Using the Chandra and XMM data, we set a useful constraint on the dark-matter–baryon cross section: ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{xp}}{/m}_x\sim 1\times {10}^{-25\mathrm{}}{\mathrm{cm}}^2{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-1\mathrm{}}$, where $m_x$ is the mass of dark matter particles.