PeV-scale dark matter as a thermal relic of a decoupled sector
By A. Berlin, D. Hooper, G. Krnjaic. 2016
133 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract In this letter, we consider a class of scenarios in which the dark matter is part of a heavy hidden sector that is thermally decoupled from the Standard Model in the early universe. The dark matter freezes-out by annihilating to a lighter, metastable state, whose subsequent abundance can naturally come to dominate the energy density of the universe. When this state decays, it reheats the visible sector and dilutes all relic abundances, thereby allowing the dark matter to be orders of magnitude heavier than the weak scale. For concreteness, we consider a simple realization with a Dirac fermion dark matter candidate coupled to a massive gauge boson that decays to the Standard Model through its kinetic mixing with hypercharge. We identify viable parameter space in which the dark matter can be as heavy as ∼1–100 PeV without being overproduced in the early universe.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03548537a6c71bc5e3a9ca573ca3eb5a411a89ba
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Citations in the corpus
- Dark Matter's secret liaisons: phenomenology of a dark U(1) sector with bound states (2016, background): “SF cross-sections at late times, thereby relaxing the CMB and indirect detection constraints. The possibility of a signicant late entropy injection in this model has already been pointed out in ref. [133], which however focused on a dierent region of the parameter space. We leave a more detailed stu”
- Dark matter, millicharges, axion and scalar particles, gauge bosons, and other new physics with LDMX (2018, unknown): “[130, 131].”
- Toward (finally!) ruling out Z and Higgs mediated dark matter models (2016, background): “Examples of such scenarios include those in which the abundance of dark matter is depleted as a result of an out-of-equilibrium decay [52–58] or a period of late-time inflation [59–63].”