A theory of dark matter

By N. Arkani-Hamed, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, T. Slatyer, N. Weiner. 2008

1,446 citations recorded by the source corpus.

� > 1GeV 1 . The long range allows a Sommerfeld enhancement to boost the annihilation cross section as required, without altering the weak-scale annihilation cross section during dark matter freeze-out in the early universe. If the dark matter annihilates into the new force carrier φ, its low mass can make hadronic modes kinematically inaccessible, forcing decays dominantly into leptons. If the force carrier is a non-Abelian gauge boson, the dark matter is part of a multiplet of states, and splittings between these states are naturally generated with size αm� � MeV, leading to the eXciting dark matter (XDM) scenario previously proposed to explain the positron annihilation in the galactic center observed by the INTEGRAL satellite; the light boson invoked by XDM to mediate a large inelastic scattering cross section is identified with the φ here. Somewhat smaller splittings would also be expected, providing a natural source for the parameters of the inelastic dark matter (iDM) explanation for the DAMA annual modulation signal. Since the Sommerfeld enhancement is most significant at low velocities, early dark matter halos at redshift � 10 potentially produce observable effects on the ionization history of the universe. Because of the enhanced cross section, detection of substructure is more probable than with a conventional WIMP. Moreover, the low velocity dispersion of dwarf galaxies and Milky Way subhalos can increase the substructure annihilation signal by an additional order of magnitude or more.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e6d265dad73107f8c820304d90ba5c5cf5b6638

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Citations in the corpus

Probing dark forces and light hidden sectors at low-energy e+e- colliders (2009, methodology): “This can be explained by Sommerfeld enhancement of the annihilation cross-section through an O(GeV) mass force mediator at low velocities [8].”
Fermi 130 GeV gamma-ray excess and dark matter annihilation in sub-haloes and in the Galactic centre (2012, background): “urces. We study, classify and t the possible model independent DM annihilation scenarios [12] into two and four standard model nal states (the latter is assumed to occur via light intermediate states [13] that may also induce Sommerfeld enhancement of the annihilation cross-section). We nd that, amo”
Abelian hidden sectors at a GeV (2009, background): “For the models discussed in the previous sections, we find that their collider signatures involve photons plus missing energy, and in some cases highly collimated “lepton jets” [8, 11].”
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).”
Cosmological simulations with self-interacting dark matter – II. Halo shapes versus observations (2012, background): “…possibility is that the dark matter belongs to and interacts with a “dark” or “hidden” sector (Khlopov, Stephan & Fargion 2006; Feldman, Kors & Nath 2007; Foot 2007; Pospelov, Ritz & Voloshin 2008; Feng & Kumar 2008; Arkani-Hamed et al. 2009; Feng et al. 2009; Sigurdson 2009; Cohen et al. 2010).”
Numerical simulations of the dark universe: State of the art and the next decade (2012, background): “dependent enhancement in the annihilation cross section [142, 143].”
A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, methodology): “These models provided the tools for the kinetically mixed dark photon which was the basis of the models of [109, 202].”
Bound-state formation for thermal relic dark matter and unitarity (2014, background): “It is already being probed by direct and indirect detection experiments [12–16]; in fact, DM with mass m & 500 GeV has been invoked to explain the high-energy positron excess observed by PAMELA, Fermi and AMS [15–19].”
Sensitivity projections for dark matter searches with the Fermi large area telescope (2016, background): “ simple modications of the canonical thermal relic theory can result in present-day annihilation cross sections that dier by orders of magnitude from the standard assumption of h˙vi˘ 3 2610 cm3 s 1 [23]. Furthermore, in some theoretical frameworks, the DM particles may decay with lifetimes that are ”