Enabling forbidden dark matter
Name
PhysRevD.96.083521.pdf
Size
1.31 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Cline, James M.
Liu, Hongwan
Slatyer, Tracy Robyn
Xue, Wei
Date Issued
October 2017
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Cline, James M. et al. "Enabling forbidden dark matter." Physical Review D 96, 8 (October 2017): 083521 © 2017 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The thermal relic density of dark matter is conventionally set by two-body annihilations. We point out that in many simple models, 3→2 annihilations can play an important role in determining the relic density over a broad range of model parameters. This occurs when the two-body annihilation is kinematically forbidden, but the 3→2 process is allowed; we call this scenario not-forbidden dark matter. We illustrate this mechanism for a vector-portal dark matter model, showing that for a dark matter mass of m[subscript χ]∼MeV-10 GeV, 3→2 processes not only lead to the observed relic density, but also imply a self-interaction cross section that can solve the cusp/core problem. This can be accomplished while remaining consistent with stringent CMB constraints on light dark matter, and can potentially be discovered at future direct detection experiments.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.083521
