Model for Thermal Relic Dark Matter of Strongly Interacting Massive Particles

Yonit Hochberg; Eric Kuflik; Hitoshi Murayama; Tomer Volansky; Jay G Wacker

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.021301

Model for Thermal Relic Dark Matter of Strongly Interacting Massive Particles

Phys Rev Lett. 2015 Jul 10;115(2):021301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.021301. Epub 2015 Jul 10.

Authors

Yonit Hochberg^{1

2}, Eric Kuflik³, Hitoshi Murayama^{1

2

4}, Tomer Volansky⁵, Jay G Wacker^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
² Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
³ Department of Physics, LEPP, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.
⁴ Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI), University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa 277-8583, Japan.
⁵ Department of Physics, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
⁶ Quora, Mountain View, California 94041, USA.
⁷ Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

PMID: 26207457
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.021301

Abstract

A recent proposal is that dark matter could be a thermal relic of 3→2 scatterings in a strongly coupled hidden sector. We present explicit classes of strongly coupled gauge theories that admit this behavior. These are QCD-like theories of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, where the pions play the role of dark matter. The number-changing 3→2 process, which sets the dark matter relic abundance, arises from the Wess-Zumino-Witten term. The theories give an explicit relationship between the 3→2 annihilation rate and the 2→2 self-scattering rate, which alters predictions for structure formation. This is a simple calculable realization of the strongly interacting massive-particle mechanism.