Homeopathic Dark Matter, or how diluted heavy substances produce high energy cosmic rays

Cirelli, Marco; Gouttenoire, Yann; Petraki, Kalliopi; Sala, Filippo

doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2019/02/014

Cited by 81 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 130 publications

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“…The unknown particle nature of dark matter has inspired a plethora of imaginative models [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Among them, one well-motivated model is unique in its simplicity and specificity, and that is a thermal-relic WIMP that annihilates to Standard-Model particles [7][8][9][10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tev-scale thermal WIMPs: Unitarity and its consequences

Smirnov

Beacom

2019

Phys. Rev. D

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We re-examine unitarity bounds on the annihilation cross section of thermal-WIMP dark matter. For high-mass pointlike dark matter, it is generic to form WIMP bound states, which, together with Sommerfeld enhancement, affects the relic abundance. We show that these effects lower the unitarity bound from 139 TeV to below 100 TeV for non-self-conjugate dark matter and from 195 TeV (the oft-quoted value of 340 TeV assumes ΩDM h 2 = 1) to 140 TeV for the self-conjugate case. For composite dark matter, for which the unitarity limit on the radius was thought to be mass-independent, we show that the largest allowed mass is 1 PeV. In addition, we find important new effects for annihilation in the late universe. For example, while the production of high-energy light fermions in WIMP annihilation is suppressed by helicity, we show that bound-state formation changes this. Coupled with rapidly improving experimental sensitivity to TeV-range gamma rays, cosmic rays, and neutrinos, our results give new hope to attack the thermal-WIMP mass range from the high-mass end.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tev-scale thermal WIMPs: Unitarity and its consequences

Smirnov

Beacom

2019

Phys. Rev. D

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“…[15] for two main reasons: (1) their analysis only included production through nucleon-nucleon bremsstrahlung, which is subdominant in all of the parameter space we considered to the production from e + e − and (2) their treatment of the trapped regime is more conservative in that they only consider the equivalent of the free-streaming sphere and approximate the dark matter flux as a black-body at that radius. 5 The relic density line is reproduced from Ref. [19] and corresponds to where the relic abundance of dark fermions produced by freeze-out matches the observed dark matter density.…”

Section: Re Lic De Ns Itymentioning

confidence: 69%

“…Another recent idea has been to use stars and cosmic-rays to accelerate a fraction of the galactic DM to higher energies, also enhancing the sensitivity to some models of dark matter[3][4][5][6].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Supernova signals of light dark matter

et al. 2019

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Dark matter direct detection experiments have poor sensitivity to a galactic population of dark matter with mass below the GeV scale. However, such dark matter can be produced copiously in supernovae. Since this thermally-produced population is much hotter than the galactic dark matter, it can be observed with direct detection experiments. In this paper, we focus on a dark sector with fermion dark matter and a heavy dark photon as a specific example. We first extend existing supernova cooling constraints on this model to the regime of strong coupling where the dark matter becomes diffusively trapped in the supernova. Then, using the fact that even outside these cooling constraints the diffuse galactic flux of these dark sector particles can still be large, we show that this flux is detectable in direct detection experiments such as current and next-generation liquid xenon detectors. As a result, due to supernova production, light dark matter has the potential to be discovered over many orders of magnitude of mass and coupling.ArXiv ePrint: 19xx.xxxxx

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“…2 and 3. BSF V has been computed in [4,10] (see [8] for non-Abelian generalisations), and a number of papers have considered its effects on the DM relic density [2,7,8,[13][14][15][16] and indirect signals [13][14][15][17][18][19][20]. Here, the coupling of DM to the light scalar gives rise to an additional contribution to the BSF V amplitude at leading order, shown in fig.…”

Section: Radiative Capture Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dark matter bound state formation via emission of a charged scalar

Oncala

Petraki

2020

J. High Energ. Phys.

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The formation of stable or meta-stable bound states can dramatically affect the phenomenology of dark matter (DM). Although the capture into bound states via emission of a vector is known to be significant, the capture via scalar emission suffers from cancellations that render it important only within narrow parameter space. While this is true for neutral scalar mediators, here we show that bound-state formation via emission of a charged scalar can be extremely significant. To this end, we consider DM charged under a dark U (1) force and coupled also to a light complex scalar that is charged under the same gauge symmetry. We compute the cross-sections for bound-state formation via emission of the charged scalar, and show that they can exceed those for capture via vector emission, as well as annihilation, by orders of magnitude. This holds even for very small values of the DM coupling to the charged scalar, and remains true in the limit of global symmetry. We then compute the DM thermal freeze-out, and find that the capture into meta-stable bound states via emission of a charged scalar can cause a late period of significant DM depletion. Our results include analytical expressions in the Coulomb limit, and are readily generalisable to non-Abelian interactions. We expect them to have implications for Higgs-portal scenarios of multi-TeV WIMP DM, as well as scenarios that feature dark Higgses or (darkly-)charged inert scalars, including models of self-interacting DM.

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Homeopathic Dark Matter, or how diluted heavy substances produce high energy cosmic rays

Cited by 81 publications

References 130 publications

Tev-scale thermal WIMPs: Unitarity and its consequences

Tev-scale thermal WIMPs: Unitarity and its consequences

Supernova signals of light dark matter

Dark matter bound state formation via emission of a charged scalar

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