Related papers: Getting a THUMP from a WIMP
The observed density of dark matter is of the magnitude expected for a thermal relic weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP). In addition, the observed baryon density is within an order of magnitude of the dark matter density. This…
Weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) is well known to be a good candidate for dark matter, and it is also predicted by many new physics models beyond the standard model at the TeV scale. We found that, if the WIMP is a vector particle…
We re-examine unitarity bounds on the annihilation cross section of thermal-WIMP dark matter. For high-mass pointlike dark matter, it is generic to form WIMP bound states, which, together with Sommerfeld enhancement, affects the relic…
It is quite plausible that the mass of the dark matter particle increases significantly after its freeze-out, due to a scalar field rolling to large values. We describe a realization of this scenario in the context of thermal inflation…
We describe an approach to detect dark matter and other invisible particles with mass below a GeV, exploiting missing energy-momentum measurements and other kinematic features of fixed-target production. In the case of an invisibly decaying…
Many models have recently been proposed in which dark matter (DM) couples to Standard Model fields via a GeV-scale dark sector. We consider scenarios of this type where the DM mass, at the electroweak/TeV scale, is generated by the VEV of a…
We show that hidden hot dark matter, hidden-sector dark matter with interactions that decouple when it is relativistic, is a viable dark matter candidate provided it has never been in thermal equilibrium with the particles of the standard…
The thermal freeze-out mechanism for relic dark matter heavier than $O(10-100 $ TeV$)$ requires cross-sections that violate perturbative unitarity. Yet the existence of dark matter heavier than these scales is certainly plausible from a…
The persistent null results at dark matter (DM) direct-detection experiments have pushed the popular weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) DM to tight corners. Generic WIMP models with direct-detection rate below the current upper…
We propose a comprehensive theory of dark matter that explains the recent proliferation of unexpected observations in high-energy astrophysics. Cosmic ray spectra from ATIC and PAMELA require a WIMP with mass M_chi ~ 500 - 800 GeV that…
We discuss a simple model of thermal relic dark matter whose mass can be much larger than the so-called unitarity limit on the mass of point-like particle dark matter. The model consists of new strong dynamics with one flavor of fermions in…
Thermal relics lighter than an MeV contribute to the energy density of the universe at the time of nucleosynthesis and recombination. Constraints on extra radiation degrees of freedom typically exclude even the simplest of such dark…
One of the most promising strategies to identify the nature of dark matter consists in the search for new particles at accelerators and with so-called direct detection experiments. Working within the framework of simplified models, and…
If dark matter (DM) is a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that is a thermal relic of the early Universe, then its total self-annihilation cross section is revealed by its present-day mass density. The canonical thermally averaged…
Supernovae can produce vast fluxes of new particles with masses on the MeV scale, a mass scale of interest for models of light dark matter. When these new particles become diffusively trapped within the supernova, the escaping flux will…
We consider a class of models in which thermal dark matter is lighter than an MeV. If dark matter thermalizes with the Standard Model below the temperature of neutrino-photon decoupling, equilibration and freeze-out cools and heats the…
A larger Planck scale during an early epoch leads to a smaller Hubble rate, which is the measure for efficiency of primordial processes. The resulting slower cosmic tempo can accommodate alternative cosmological histories. We consider this…
Dark matter may be hidden, with no standard model gauge interactions. At the same time, in WIMPless models with hidden matter masses proportional to hidden gauge couplings squared, the hidden dark matter's thermal relic density may…
Heavy vector boson dark matter at the TeV scale or higher may be produced non-thermally in a first-order phase transition taking place at a lower energy scale. While the production of vector dark matter has previously been studied for…
TeV-mass dark matter charged under a new GeV-scale gauge force can explain electronic cosmic-ray anomalies. We propose that the CoGeNT and DAMA direct detection experiments are observing scattering of light stable states -- "GeV-Matter" --…