Quirky composite dark matter

By G. Kribs, T. Roy, J. Terning, K. Zurek. 2009

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a new dark matter candidate, 'quirky dark matter', that is a scalar baryonic bound state of a new non-Abelian force that becomes strong below the electroweak scale. The bound state is made of chiral quirks: new fermions that transform under both the new strong force as well as in a chiral representation of the electroweak group, acquiring mass from the Higgs mechanism. Electric charge neutrality of the lightest baryon requires approximately degenerate quirk masses which also causes the charge radius of the bound state to be negligible. The abundance is determined by an asymmetry that is linked to the baryon and lepton numbers of the universe through electroweak sphalerons. Dark matter elastic scattering with nuclei proceeds through Higgs exchange as well as an electromagnetic polarizability operator which is just now being tested in direct detection experiments. A novel method to search for quirky dark matter is to look for a gamma-ray 'dark line' spectroscopic feature in galaxy clusters that result from the quirky Lyman-alpha or quirky hyperfine transitions. Colliders are expected to dominantly produce quirky mesons, not quirky baryons, consequently large missing energy is not the primary collider signal of the physics associated with quirky dark matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04c5f9d7898bf435aca2073f4f2ebc20afb01d25

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Citations in the corpus

Double-Disk Dark Matter (2013, background): “The idea of asymmetric dark matter has inspired many proposals for how the dark matter and baryon abundances may be related [64–74], and similar considerations could explain the amount of DDDM.”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “This requires annihilation cross sections in the early Universe at least as large as those of a thermal relic [52], and so Λ−1ADM & 5× 10 −5 GeV−1.”
Self-Interacting Dark Matter from a Non-Abelian Hidden Sector (2014, unknown): “[15–25].”
Accidental composite dark matter (2015, background): “with supersymmetry [5], with composite [6–9] or partially composite Higgs [10–12], with a mirror-SM sector [13] or quirks [14] or a fourth generation [15] as well as from a phenomenological point of view, in order to realise special situations (such as inelastic DM, asymmetric DM, strongly interacti”
Dark nuclei. I. Cosmology and indirect detection (2014, background): “Popular examples include dark sectors, or sub-sectors, with dark atomic behavior [1–12] or strongly-coupled dark sectors leading to composite DM candidates [13–35], which are the focus of this work.”