A taste of dark matter: flavour constraints on pseudoscalar mediators
By M. Dolan, Felix Kahlhoefer, C. McCabe, K. Schmidt-Hoberg. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2014
235 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Dark matter interacting via the exchange of a light pseudoscalar can induce observable signals in indirect detection experiments and experience large self-interactions while evading the strong bounds from direct dark matter searches. The pseudoscalar mediator will however induce flavour-changing interactions in the Standard Model, providing a promising alternative way to test these models. We investigate in detail the constraints arising from rare meson decays and fixed target experiments for different coupling structures between the pseudoscalar and Standard Model fermions. The resulting bounds are highly complementary to the information inferred from the dark matter relic density and the constraints from primordial nucleosynthesis. We discuss the implications of our findings for the dark matter self-interaction cross section and the prospects of probing dark matter coupled to a light pseudoscalar with direct or indirect detection experiments. In particular, we find that a pseudoscalar mediator can only explain the Galactic Centre excess if its mass is above that of the B mesons, and that it is impossible to obtain a sufficiently large direct detection cross section to account for the DAMA modulation.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a895920027d33473afae0bddd5ecc06b208e9a9
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Citations in the corpus
- ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC (2017, unknown): “VII; the parameter regions of SIMP/ELDER models that reduce to WIMPless models [85]; axion-like particles that mix with pions and decay to e+e− pairs with ∼ 10 − 100 m decay lengths [86]; heavy neutral leptons that mix with active neutrinos and decay via N → e+e−ν with long lifetimes [87, 88]; co-an”
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- Dark Matter through the Higgs portal (2019, background): “In the case of a pseudoscalar mediator, its t–channel exchange leads to a momentum suppressed cross section [384,385] that is very far from experimental sensitivity [385].”
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- FASER’s physics reach for long-lived particles (2018, background): “Possible decays into light hadrons are notoriously hard to calculate, but they are also suppressed [95, 97].”