No Arabic abstract
A statistically significant excess of gamma rays has been reported and robustly confirmed in the Galactic Center over the past decade. Large local dark matter densities suggest that this Galactic Center Excess (GCE) may be attributable to new physics, and indeed it has been shown that this signal is well-modelled by annihilations dominantly into $bbar{b}$ with a WIMP-scale cross section. In this paper, we consider Majorana dark matter annihilating through a Higgs portal as a candidate source for this signal, where a large CP-violation in the Higgs coupling may serve to severely suppress scattering rates. In particular, we explore the phenomenology of two minimal UV completions, a singlet-doublet model and a doublet-triplet model, and map out the available parameter space which can give a viable signal while respecting current experimental constraints.
Dark Matter (DM) models providing possible alternative solutions to the small- scale crisis of standard cosmology are nowadays of growing interest. We consider DM interacting with light hidden fermions via well motivated fundamental operators showing the resultant matter power spectrum is suppressed on subgalactic scales within a plausible parameter region. Our basic description of the evolution of cosmological perturbations relies on a fully consistent first principles derivation of a perturbed Fokker-Planck type equation, generalizing existing literature. The cosmological perturbation of the Fokker-Planck equation is presented for the first time in two different gauges, where the results transform into each other according to the rules of gauge transformation. Furthermore, our focus lies on a derivation of a broadly applicable and easily computable collision term showing important phenomenological differences to other existing approximations. As one of the main results and concerning the small-scale crisis, we show the equal importance of vector and scalar boson mediated interactions between DM and light fermions.
We study a simple model that can give rise to isospin-violating interactions of Dirac fermion asymmetric dark matter to protons and neutrons through the interference of a scalar and U(1)$$ gauge boson contribution. The model can yield a large suppression of the elastic scattering cross section off Xenon relative to Silicon thus reconciling CDMS-Si and LUX results while being compatible with LHC findings on the 126 GeV Higgs, electroweak precision tests and flavour constraints.
The clockwork mechanism allows extremely weak interactions and small mass scales to be understood in terms of the structure of a theory. A natural application of the clockwork mechanism is to the freeze-in mechanism for dark matter production. Here we consider a Higgs portal freeze-in dark matter model based on a scalar clockwork sector with a mass scale which is less than the Higgs boson mass. The dark matter scalar is the lightest scalar of the clockwork sector. Freeze-in dark matter is produced by the decay of thermal Higgs bosons to the clockwork dark matter scalars. We show that the mass of the dark matter scalar is typically in the 1-10 keV range and may be warm enough to have an observable effect on perturbation growth and Lyman-$alpha$ observations. Clockwork Higgs portal freeze-in models have a potentially observable collider phenomenology, with the Higgs boson decaying to missing energy in the form of pairs of long-lived clockwork sector scalars, plus a distribution of different numbers of quark and lepton particle-antiparticle pairs. The branching ratio to different numbers of quark and lepton pairs is determined by the clockwork sector parameters (the number of clockwork scalars $N$ and the clockwork charge $q$), which could therefore be determined experimentally if such Higgs decay modes are observed. In the case of a minimal Standard Model observable sector, the combination of nucleosynthesis and Lyman-$alpha$ constraints is likely to exclude on-shell Higgs decays to clockwork scalars, although off-shell Higgs decays would still be possible. On-shell Higgs decays to clockwork scalars can be consistent with cosmological constraints in simple extensions of the Standard Model with light singlet scalars.
The axion arises in well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics and is regarded as an alternative to the weakly interacting massive particle paradigm to explain the nature of dark matter. In this contribution, we review theoretical aspects of dark matter axions, particularly focusing on recent developments in the estimation of their relic abundance. A closer look at their non-thermal production mechanisms in the early universe reveals the possibility of explaining the observed dark matter abundance in various mass ranges. The mass ranges predicted in various cosmological scenarios are briefly summarized.
Searches for invisible Higgs decays at the Large Hadron Collider constrain dark matter Higgs-portal models, where dark matter interacts with the Standard Model fields via the Higgs boson. While these searches complement dark matter direct-detection experiments, a comparison of the two limits depends on the coupling of the Higgs boson to the nucleons forming the direct-detection nuclear target, typically parameterized in a single quantity $f_N$. We evaluate $f_N$ using recent phenomenological and lattice-QCD calculations, and include for the first time the coupling of the Higgs boson to two nucleons via pion-exchange currents. We observe a partial cancellation for Higgs-portal models that makes the two-nucleon contribution anomalously small. Our results, summarized as $f_N=0.308(18)$, show that the uncertainty of the Higgs-nucleon coupling has been vastly overestimated in the past. The improved limits highlight that state-of-the-art nuclear physics input is key to fully exploiting experimental searches.