Light dark matter accumulating in planets: Nuclear scattering

We present, for the first time, a complete treatment of strongly interacting dark matter capture in planets, taking Earth as an example. We focus on light dark matter and the heating of Earth by dark matter annihilation, addressing a number of crucial dynamical processes which have been overlooked, such as the "ping-pong effect" during dark matter capture. We perform full Monte Carlo simulations and obtain improved bounds on strongly-interacting dark matter from Earth heating and direct detection experiments for both spin-independent and spin-dependent interactions, while also allowing for the interacting species to make up a subcomponent of the cosmological dark matter.