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Can dark matter form ice cream cones inside neutron stars?

Deep Ghosh, Anirban Das

May 21, 2026

When bosonic dark matter particles accumulate inside neutron stars, they can form a quantum condensate—like a superfluid—that dramatically boosts their annihilation rate. This condensate heating effect makes normally cold neutron stars bright enough for infrared telescopes to spot, and opens a window on dark matter properties that terrestrial detectors can't reach due to neutrino background noise.
Published as Probing freeze-in dark matter using Bose-Einstein condensate in neutron star arXiv:2605.22245
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