Bound-state formation for thermal relic dark matter and unitarity

By B. Harling, K. Petraki. 2014

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that the relic abundance of thermal dark matter annihilating via a long-range interaction, is significantly affected by the formation and decay of dark matter bound states in the early universe, if the dark matter mass is above a few TeV . We determine the coupling required to obtain the observed dark matter density, taking into account both the direct 2-to-2 annihilations and the formation of bound states, and provide an analytical fit. We argue that the unitarity limit on the inelastic cross-section is realized only if dark matter annihilates via a long-range interaction, and we determine the upper bound on the mass of thermal-relic dark matter to be about 197 (139) TeV for (non)-self-conjugate dark matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3739a6297ec2c1bd330f57baabbcfdba072357e2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Alessandro Strumia
2. P. Panci
3. M. Redi
4. Marco Cirelli
5. C. Arina
6. M. Taoso
7. Olivier Mattelaer
8. Fabio Maltoni

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Olivier Mattelaer
2. Alessandro Strumia
3. P. Panci
4. Fabio Maltoni
5. M. Redi
6. Marco Cirelli
7. Mihailo Backovic
8. F. Sala

Citations in the corpus

• Dark Matter's secret liaisons: phenomenology of a dark U(1) sector with bound states (2016, methodology): “DM relic density for M DM & TeV [32]. More recently, it was shown that, in the same mass range, the formation and decay of particleantiparticle bound states depletes signicantly the DM abundance [54], thereby reducing the predicted D further. We follow the analysis of ref. [54], to determine the”
• Cosmological implications of Dark Matter bound states (2017, background): “state via emission of a vector is kinematically possible if the binding energy ˘2 eM ˜ plus the kinetic energy M ˜v 2 rel=4 is larger than the mass of the emitted vector: M V <˘( e +v 2 rel )M ˜ [7]. The binding energies in a Yukawa potential can be exactly computed at rst order in M V by expandi”
• 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.”