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Title: Spontaneous freeze out of dark matter from an early thermal phase transition

Journal Article · · Physical Review. D.
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2]
  1. Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (United States)
  2. Center for Theoretical Physics (CPHT) at Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau (France); ; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Palaiseau (France)

We propose a new paradigm for the thermal production of dark matter in the early Universe, in which dark-matter particles acquire their mass and freeze out spontaneously from the thermal bath after a dark phase transition takes place. The decoupling arises because the dark-matter particles become suddenly nonrelativistic and not because of any decay channel becoming kinematically close. We propose a minimal scenario in which a scalar and a fermionic dark matter are in thermal equilibrium with the standard-model bath. We compute the finite temperature corrections to the scalar potential and identify a region of the parameter space where the fermionic dark-matter mass spontaneously jumps over the temperature when the dark phase transition happens. We explore the phenomenological implications of such a model in simple cases and show that the annihilation cross section of dark-matter particles has to be larger by more than 1 order of magnitude as compared to the usual constant-mass weakly interacting massive particle scenario in order to accommodate the correct relic abundance. We show that in the spontaneous freeze out regime a TeV-scale fermionic dark matter that annihilates into leptons through $$\mathcal{s}$$-wave processes can be accessible to detection in the near future.

Research Organization:
Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); Royal Society; National Science Foundation (NSF)
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0009913; FG02-13ER41976; IE160590; PHY-1607611; ANR-11-IDEX-0003-01; ANR-10-LABX-0038; FG02-13ER41976 (de-sc0009913)
OSTI ID:
1601081
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1801912
Journal Information:
Physical Review. D., Vol. 101, Issue 4; ISSN 2470-0010
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 16 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (3)

Dark matter as a heavy thermal hot relic journal August 2020
Filtered pseudo-scalar dark matter and gravitational waves from first order phase transition journal June 2021
Dark-Matter Spontaneous Freeze Out conference January 2020