Semi-annihilation of dark matter
By F. D’Eramo, Jesse Thaler. 2010
186 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We show that the thermal relic abundance of dark matter can be affected by a new type of reaction: semi-annihilation. Semi-annihilation takes the schematic form ψiψj → ψkφ, where ψi are stable dark matter particles and φ is an unstable state. Such reactions are generically present when dark matter is composed of more than one species with “flavor” and/or “baryon” symmetries. We give a complete set of coupled Boltzmann equations in the presence of semi-annihilations, and study two toy models featuring this process. Semi-annihilation leads to non-trivial dark matter dynamics in the early universe, often dominating over ordinary annihilation in determining the relic abundance. This process also has important implications for indirect detection experiments, by enriching the final state spectrum from dark matter (semi-)annihilation in the Milky Way.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Materials Chemistry, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/003af9ce5d2b2d5c28b9e0a4c5506711ce9d2c2e
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In Artificial Intelligence
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
- Alexander Pukhov
- G. B'elanger
- Fawzi Boudjema
- A. Semenov
- A. Karam
- K. Tamvakis
- M. Maniatis
- Abdelhak Djouadi
Citations in the corpus
- micrOMEGAs_3: A program for calculating dark matter observables (2013, background): “These processes are called semi-annihilation [44, 45, 29] The simplest example of a discrete symmetry which leads to semi-annihilation processes is Z3.”
- Dark matter and neutrino masses from a scale-invariant multi-Higgs portal (2015, background): “The dark vector bosons Xa can both annihilate and semiannihilate [106,107], the relevant processes being listed in Figs.”