WIMPonium and Boost Factors for Indirect Dark Matter Detection

By J. March-Russell, S. West. 2008

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We argue that WIMP dark matter can annihilate via long-lived “WIMPonium” bound states in reasonable particle physics models of dark matter (DM). WIMPonium bound states can occur at or near threshold leading to substantial enhancements in the DM annihilation rate, closely related to the Sommerfeld effect. Large “boost factor” amplifications in the annihilation rate can thus occur without large density enhancements, possibly preferring colder less dense objects such as dwarf galaxies as locations for indirect DM searches. The radiative capture to and transitions among the WIMPonium states generically lead to a rich energy spectrum of annihilation products, with many distinct lines possible in the case of 2-body decays to γγ or γZ final states. The existence of multiple radiative capture modes further enhances the total annihilation rate, and the detection of the lines would give direct over-determined information on the nature and self-interactions of the DM particles.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a11d14d079c977f873a608edc381791325fb307

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Citations in the corpus

Hidden charged dark matter (2009, background): “Some of these implications have been considered previously [12–17], and others are possible [35–50].”
Higgs portal, fermionic dark matter, and a Standard Model like Higgs at 125 GeV (2012, background): “[41–43] (see also [44] for a very similar framework).”
MadDM v.3.0: A comprehensive tool for dark matter studies (2018, background): “the Sommerfeld enhancement [108, 109] and bound state formation [110, 111], relevant for dark matter models with light mediators (as compared to the dark matter mass) at low velocities such as the one of indirect detection or recombination epoch.”
Sommerfeld factor for arbitrary partial wave processes (2009, background): “Recently, the importance of the Sommerfeld effect in dark matter annihilation has been pointed out in [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] for properly calculating thermal relic densities, and determining signals for indirect dark matter searches.”
Dark Matter's secret liaisons: phenomenology of a dark U(1) sector with bound states (2016, unknown): “[23, 52, 53], the issue has been investigated more systematically in a series of recent studies [54–71].”
Cosmological implications of Dark Matter bound states (2017, background): “Recent literature [6–10] (see [11] for earlier work) recognised that a second related phenomenon is important too: formation of bound states B of two Dark Matter particles with binding energy of order α2M , through processes analogous to the formation of hydrogen at recombination.”