Thermal squeezeout of dark matter
Name
PhysRevD.104.095013.pdf
Description
Published version
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1.61 MB
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Author(s) • • • • •
Asadi, Pouya
Kramer, Eric David
Kuflik, Eric
Ridgway, Gregory W
Slatyer, Tracy R
Smirnov, Juri
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Citation
Asadi, Pouya, Kramer, Eric David, Kuflik, Eric, Ridgway, Gregory W, Slatyer, Tracy R et al. 2021. "Thermal squeezeout of dark matter." Physical Review D, 104 (9).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We carry out a detailed study of the confinement phase transition in a dark
sector with a $SU(N)$ gauge group and a single generation of dark heavy quark.
We focus on heavy enough quarks such that their abundance freezes out before
the phase transition and the phase transition is of first-order. We find that
during this phase transition the quarks are trapped inside contracting pockets
of the deconfined phase and are compressed enough to interact at a significant
rate, giving rise to a second stage of annihilation that can dramatically
change the resulting dark matter abundance. As a result, the dark matter can be
heavier than the often-quoted unitarity bound of $\sim100~$TeV. Our findings
are almost completely independent of the details of the portal between the dark
sector and the Standard Model. We comment briefly on possible signals of such a
sector. Our main findings are summarized in a companion letter, while here we
provide further details on different parts of the calculation.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVD.104.095013