English

The case for decaying spin-3/2 dark matter

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2020-10-28 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We couple a sterile neutrino sector to a spin-3/2 particle and show that with a Planck reduced coupling, we can obtain a sufficiently long lifetime making the spin-3/2 particle a good dark matter candidate. We show that this dark matter candidate can be produced during inflationary reheating through the scattering of Standard Model particles. The relic abundance as determined by Planck and other experimental measurements is attained for reasonable values of the reheating temperature TRH108T_{\rm RH} \gtrsim 10^{8} GeV. We consider two possible gauge invariant couplings to the extended Standard Model. We find a large range of masses are possible which respect the experimental limits on its decay rate. We expect smoking-gun signals in the form of a monochromatic photon with a possible monochromatic neutrino, which can be probed in the near future in IceCube and other indirect detection experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.03325,
  title  = {The case for decaying spin-3/2 dark matter},
  author = {Marcos A. G. Garcia and Yann Mambrini and Keith A. Olive and Sarunas Verner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.03325},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

20 pages, 13 figures. v3: matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:04:55.238Z