No Arabic abstract
We study electroweak scale Dark Matter (DM) whose interactions with baryonic matter are mediated by a heavy anomalous $Z$. We emphasize that when the DM is a Majorana particle, its low-velocity annihilations are dominated by loop suppressed annihilations into the gauge bosons, rather than by p-wave or chirally suppressed annihilations into the SM fermions. Because the $Z$ is anomalous, these kinds of DM models can be realized only as effective field theories (EFTs) with a well-defined cutoff, where heavy spectator fermions restore gauge invariance at high energies. We formulate these EFTs, estimate their cutoff and properly take into account the effect of the Chern-Simons terms one obtains after the spectator fermions are integrated out. We find that, while for light DM collider and direct detection experiments usually provide the strongest bounds, the bounds at higher masses are heavily dominated by indirect detection experiments, due to strong annihilation into $W^+W^-$, $ZZ$, $Zgamma$ and possibly into $gg$ and $gammagamma$. We emphasize that these annihilation channels are generically significant because of the structure of the EFT, and therefore these models are prone to strong indirect detection constraints. Even though we focus on selected $Z$ models for illustrative purposes, our setup is completely generic and can be used for analyzing the predictions of any anomalous $Z$-mediated DM model with arbitrary charges.
We consider a simple supersymmetric hidden sector: pure SU(N) gauge theory. Dark matter is made up of hidden glueballinos with mass $m_X$ and hidden glueballs with mass near the confinement scale $Lambda$. For $m_X sim 1,text{TeV}$ and $Lambda sim 100,text{MeV}$, the glueballinos freeze out with the correct relic density and self-interact through glueball exchange to resolve small-scale structure puzzles. An immediate consequence is that the glueballino spectrum has a hyperfine splitting of order $Lambda^2 / m_X sim 10,text{keV}$. We show that the radiative decays of the excited state can explain the observed 3.5 keV X-ray line signal from clusters of galaxies, Andromeda, and the Milky Way.
We show for the first time that the loop-driven kinetic mixing between visible and dark Abelian gauge bosons can facilitate dark matter production in the early Universe by creating a dynamic portal, which depends on the energy of the process. The required smallness of the strength of the portal interaction, suited for freeze-in, is justified by a suppression arising from the mass of a heavy vector-like fermion. The strong temperature sensitivity associated with the interaction is responsible for most of the dark matter production during the early stages of reheating.
We propose a model where a long-lived pseudoscalar EeV particle can be produced with sufficient abundance so as to account for the cold dark matter density, despite having a Planck mass suppressed coupling to the thermal bath. Connecting this state to a hidden sterile neutrino sector through derivative couplings, induced by higher dimensional operators, allows one to account for light neutrino masses while having a lifetime that can be much larger than the age of the Universe. Moreover, the same derivative coupling accounts for the production of dark matter in the very first instant of the reheating. Given the sensitivity of the IceCube and ANITA collaborations, we study the possible signatures of such a model in the form of Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays in the neutrino sector, and show that such signals could be detected in the near future.
The hypothesis of two different components in the high-energy neutrino flux observed with IceCube has been proposed to solve the tension among different data-sets and to account for an excess of neutrino events at 100 TeV. In addition to a standard astrophysical power-law component, the second component might be explained by a different class of astrophysical sources, or more intriguingly, might originate from decaying or annihilating dark matter. These two scenarios can be distinguished thanks to the different expected angular distributions of neutrino events. Neutrino signals from dark matter are indeed expected to have some correlation with the extended galactic dark matter halo. In this paper, we perform angular power spectrum analyses of simulated neutrino sky maps to investigate the two-component hypothesis with a contribution from dark matter. We provide current constraints and expected sensitivity to dark matter parameters for future neutrino telescopes such as IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT. The latter is found to be more sensitive than IceCube-Gen2 to look for a dark matter signal at low energies towards the galactic center. Finally, we show that after 10 years of data-taking, they will firmly probe the current best-fit scenario for decaying dark matter by exploiting the angular information only.
This white paper summarizes the activities of the Brazilian community concerning dark matter physics and highlights the importance of financial support to Brazilian groups that are deeply involved in experimental endeavours. The flagships of the Brazilian dark matter program are the Cherenkov Telescope Array, DARKSIDE, SBN and LHC experiments, but we emphasize that smaller experiments such as DAMIC and CONNIE constitute important probes to dark sectors as well and should receive special attention. Small experimental projects showing the potential to probe new regions of parameter space of dark matter models are encouraged. On the theoretical and phenomenological side, some groups are devoted to astrophysical aspects such as the dark matter density profile while others explore the signature of dark matter models at colliders, direct and indirect detection experiments. In summary, the Brazilian dark matter community that was born not long ago has grown tremendously in the past years and now plays an important role in the hunt for a dark matter particle.