Roadmap to Thermal Dark Matter Beyond the WIMP Unitarity Bound

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Frumkin, Ronny, Kuflik, Eric, Lavie, Itay, Silverwater, Tal
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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_version_ 1866916196649009152
author Frumkin, Ronny
Kuflik, Eric
Lavie, Itay
Silverwater, Tal
author_facet Frumkin, Ronny
Kuflik, Eric
Lavie, Itay
Silverwater, Tal
contents We study the general properties of the freezeout of a thermal relic. We give analytic estimates of the relic abundance for an arbitrary freezeout process, showing when instantaneous freezeout is appropriate and how it can be corrected when freezeout is slow. This is used to generalize the relationship between the dark mater mass and coupling that matches the observed abundance. The result encompasses well-studied particular examples, such as WIMPs, SIMPs, coannihilation, coscattering, inverse decays, and forbidden channels, and generalizes beyond them. In turn, this gives an approximate perturbative unitarity bound on the dark matter mass for an arbitrary thermal freezeout process. We show that going beyond the maximal masses allowed for freezeout via dark matter self-annihilations (WIMP-like, $m_{\rm DM}\gg\mathcal{O}(100~\rm TeV)$) predicts that there are nearly degenerate states with the dark matter and that the dark matter is generically metastable. We show how freezeout of a thermal relic may allow for dark matter masses up to the Planck scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2207_01635
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Roadmap to Thermal Dark Matter Beyond the WIMP Unitarity Bound
Frumkin, Ronny
Kuflik, Eric
Lavie, Itay
Silverwater, Tal
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
We study the general properties of the freezeout of a thermal relic. We give analytic estimates of the relic abundance for an arbitrary freezeout process, showing when instantaneous freezeout is appropriate and how it can be corrected when freezeout is slow. This is used to generalize the relationship between the dark mater mass and coupling that matches the observed abundance. The result encompasses well-studied particular examples, such as WIMPs, SIMPs, coannihilation, coscattering, inverse decays, and forbidden channels, and generalizes beyond them. In turn, this gives an approximate perturbative unitarity bound on the dark matter mass for an arbitrary thermal freezeout process. We show that going beyond the maximal masses allowed for freezeout via dark matter self-annihilations (WIMP-like, $m_{\rm DM}\gg\mathcal{O}(100~\rm TeV)$) predicts that there are nearly degenerate states with the dark matter and that the dark matter is generically metastable. We show how freezeout of a thermal relic may allow for dark matter masses up to the Planck scale.
title Roadmap to Thermal Dark Matter Beyond the WIMP Unitarity Bound
topic High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01635