Unlocking the Inelastic Dark Matter Window with Vector Mediators

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Foguel, Ana Luisa, Reimitz, Peter, Funchal, Renata Zukanovich
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Foguel, Ana Luisa
Reimitz, Peter
Funchal, Renata Zukanovich
author_facet Foguel, Ana Luisa
Reimitz, Peter
Funchal, Renata Zukanovich
contents Despite the robust cosmological and astrophysical evidence confirming the existence of a non-baryonic matter component in the Universe, the underlying nature of Dark Matter (DM) remains a mystery. Among the several possible scenarios, light DM candidates thermally produced in the early Universe are especially interesting, since their abundance could be set via the standard freeze-out mechanism. Additionally, new light states can present a rich phenomenology and are attracting increasing attention due to recent experimental capabilities to probe dark sectors with feeble interactions. In particular, inelastic DM (iDM) candidates are an appealing option, since they can avoid cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation bounds as well as indirect and direct detection searches. Although such models have been intensively studied in the literature, the usual scenario is to consider a secluded dark photon mediator. In this work, we consider the case of iDM with general vector mediators and explore the consequences of such a choice in the relic density computation, as well as for the cosmological and experimental bounds. We examine models with couplings to baryon and lepton number and show new viable parameter regions for inelastic dark matter models. Especially, anomaly-free gauge groups with non-universal couplings to leptons open new windows of the parameter space for thermal dark matter yet unexplored by experiments. We also provide a numerical Python library to compute the relic densities for user-defined gauge charges.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_00881
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unlocking the Inelastic Dark Matter Window with Vector Mediators
Foguel, Ana Luisa
Reimitz, Peter
Funchal, Renata Zukanovich
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Despite the robust cosmological and astrophysical evidence confirming the existence of a non-baryonic matter component in the Universe, the underlying nature of Dark Matter (DM) remains a mystery. Among the several possible scenarios, light DM candidates thermally produced in the early Universe are especially interesting, since their abundance could be set via the standard freeze-out mechanism. Additionally, new light states can present a rich phenomenology and are attracting increasing attention due to recent experimental capabilities to probe dark sectors with feeble interactions. In particular, inelastic DM (iDM) candidates are an appealing option, since they can avoid cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation bounds as well as indirect and direct detection searches. Although such models have been intensively studied in the literature, the usual scenario is to consider a secluded dark photon mediator. In this work, we consider the case of iDM with general vector mediators and explore the consequences of such a choice in the relic density computation, as well as for the cosmological and experimental bounds. We examine models with couplings to baryon and lepton number and show new viable parameter regions for inelastic dark matter models. Especially, anomaly-free gauge groups with non-universal couplings to leptons open new windows of the parameter space for thermal dark matter yet unexplored by experiments. We also provide a numerical Python library to compute the relic densities for user-defined gauge charges.
title Unlocking the Inelastic Dark Matter Window with Vector Mediators
topic High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00881