English

Coscattering Dark Matter in Scotogenic Models

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-10-16 v1

Abstract

The Scotogenic mechanism is an appealing pathway to naturally explain the common origin of dark matter and tiny neutrino mass. However, the conventional scotogenic dark matter usually suffers stringent constraints from the non-observation of lepton flavor violation and direct detection. To generate the non-zero neutrino masses, at least two generations of dark particles are required. For example, two real scalar singlets ϕ1\phi_1 and ϕ2\phi_2 are involved in the scotogenic inverse model, which are odd under the Z2Z_2 symmetry. In this paper, we consider the masses of dark scalars are nearly degenerate mϕ1mϕ2m_{\phi_1}\lesssim m_{\phi_2}, which opens new viable pathway for the generation of dark matter ϕ1\phi_1, such as the coscattering process ϕ1SMϕ2SM\phi_1\text{SM}\to \phi_2 \text{SM} and coannihilation processes ϕ1ϕ2SM SM\phi_1 \phi_2 \to \text{SM SM} via the Higgs portal or Yukawa portal interactions. We explore the parameter space to produce the correct relic density through coscattering, as well as the contrastive coannihilation channel. We then comprehensively study the constraints of dark matter from Higgs decay, direct detection, and indirect detection. For the heavier dark scalar, the three-body decay ϕ2ϕ1ffˉ\phi_2\to\phi_1 f\bar{f} not only alerts the predictions of big bang nucleosynthesis and cosmic microwave background, but also leads to the observable displaced vertex signature at colliders.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.13231,
  title  = {Coscattering Dark Matter in Scotogenic Models},
  author = {Ang Liu and Zhi-Long Han and Fei Huang and Feng-Lan Shao and Wei Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13231},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

30 pages, 12 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:38:17.703Z