Thermally corrected masses and freeze-in dark matter: a case study

Abstract

If coupled feebly to the Standard Model bath, a dark matter can evade the severe constraints from the direct search experiments. At the same time, such interactions help produce dark matter via the freeze-in mechanism. The freeze-in scenario becomes more interesting if one also includes the thermal masses of the different particles involved in the dark matter phenomenology. Incorporating such thermal corrections opens up the possibility of dark matter production via forbidden channels that remain kinematically disallowed in the standard freeze-in setup. Motivated by this, we investigate such freeze-in production of the dark matter in a minimally extended U (1) Lµ−Lτ framework that remains consistent with the recent muon (g − 2) data. Here, the role of the dark matter is played by the scalar with a non-trivial charge under the additional symmetry U (1) Lµ−Lτ . This scalar dark matter obtains a thermally corrected mass at high temperatures for a not-so-small self-coupling. We show that the thermal correction to the dark matter mass plays a significant role in the dark matter phenomenology.

Top-philic dark matter in a hybrid KSVZ axion framework

“…DM paradigms exist in the literature attempting to explain the DM's particle nature. Some of the most popular ones are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21], feebly interacting massive particle (FIMP) [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], asymmetric dark matter models [30,31], models with axion or axion-like particle (ALP) DM [32][33][34][35] etc. Although these models can explain the DM relic density of the Universe, their parameter spaces are restricted from different experimental searches.…”

Probing pre-BBN era with scale invariant FIMP

“…In general, any particle that couples in the thermal bath with the primordial plasma is expected to obtain a mass proportional to the temperature of the Universe provided the condition T > m is satisfied[153][154][155]. However, here we are interested in IR freeze-in, where the DM yield becomes important at lower temperature (cf.…”