The SIMPlest Miracle
Abstract
It has recently been proposed that dark matter could be a thermal relic of 3-to-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-to-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-to-2 annihilation rate and the 2-to-2 self-scattering rate, which alters predictions for structure formation. This is a simple calculable realization of the strongly-interacting-massive-particle (SIMP) mechanism.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1411.3727,
title = {The SIMPlest Miracle},
author = {Yonit Hochberg and Eric Kuflik and Hitoshi Murayama and Tomer Volansky and Jay G. Wacker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.3727},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
8 pages, 2 figures; v2: published in PRL under the title "Model for thermal relic dark matter of strongly interacting massive particles"