The effects of QCD equation of state on the relic density of WIMP dark matter
By Manuel Drees, Fazlollah Hajkarim, E. R. Schmitz. 2015
157 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs) are the most widely studied candidate particles forming the cold dark matter (CDM) whose existence can be inferred from a wealth of astrophysical and cosmological observations. In the framework of the minimal cosmological model detailed measurements on the cosmic microwave background by the PLANCK collaboration fix the scaled CDM relic density to Ωch2=0.1193±0.0014, with an error of less than 1.5%. In order to fully exploit this observational precision, theoretical calculations should have a comparable or smaller error. In this paper we use recent lattice QCD calculations to improve the description of the thermal plasma. This affects the predicted relic density of ``thermal WIMPs'', which once were in chemical equilibrium with Standard Model particles. For WIMP masses between 3 and 15 GeV, where QCD effects are most important, our predictions differ from earlier results by up to 9% (12%) for pure S-wave (P-wave) annihilation. We use these results to compute the thermally averaged WIMP annihilation cross section that reproduces the correct CDM relic density, for WIMP masses between 0.1 GeV and 10 TeV.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9fa8106100fc8af59e9056b0154096cd05971b99
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In Instrumentation
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Primordial gravitational waves, precisely: the role of thermodynamics in the Standard Model (2018, background): “In the literature, there are pioneering works to apply the equation of state in the SM to the calculation of the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter abundance [67, 68] and that of the axion dark matter abundance [64, 69].”