Semi-annihilation of dark matter
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Thaler4.pdf
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Author(s)
D'Eramo, Francesco
Thaler, Jesse
Date Issued
June 2010
Journal
Journal of High Energy Physics
Publisher
Springer, for SISSA
Citation
D’Eramo, Francesco, and Jesse Thaler. “Semi-annihilation of Dark Matter.” Journal of High Energy Physics 2010.6 (2010) : 1-34-34.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We show that the thermal relic abundance of dark matter can be affected by a new type of reaction: semi-annihilation. Semi-annihilation takes the schematic form ..., where psi i are stable dark matter particles and phi is an unstable state. Such reactions are generically present when dark matter is composed of more than one species with “flavor” and/or “baryon” symmetries. We give a complete set of coupled Boltzmann equations in the presence of semi-annihilations, and study two toy models featuring this process. Semi-annihilation leads to non-trivial dark matter dynamics in the early universe, often dominating over ordinary annihilation in determining the relic abundance. This process also has important implications for indirect detection experiments, by enriching the final state spectrum from dark matter (semi-)annihilation in the Milky Way.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep06(2010)109
