Related papers: Co-SIMP Miracle
We present a new paradigm for achieving thermal relic dark matter. The mechanism arises when a nearly secluded dark sector is thermalized with the Standard Model after reheating. The freezeout process is a number-changing 3->2 annihilation…
In this work, we present UV completions of the recently proposed number-changing Co-SIMP freeze-out mechanism. In contrast to the standard cannibalistic-type dark matter picture that occurs entirely in the dark sector, the $3\to 2$ process…
The identity of dark matter is being sought with increasingly sensitive and voluminous underground detectors. Recently the XENON1T collaboration reported excess electronic recoil events, with most of these having recoil energies around…
We present a dark matter model to explain the excess events in the electron recoil data recently reported by the Xenon1T experiment. In our model, dark matter $\chi$ annihilates into a pair of on-shell particles $\phi$ which subsequently…
The recently reported result from XENON1T experiment indicates that there is an excess with $3.5\sigma$ significance in the electronic recoil events. Interpreted as new physics, new sources are needed to account for the electronic…
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…
Recent observations by the CoGeNT collaboration (as well as long standing observations by DAMA/LIBRA) suggest the presence of a $\sim 5$-10 GeV dark matter particle with a somewhat large elastic scattering cross section with nucleons…
Dark matter with strong self-interactions provides a compelling solution to several small-scale structure puzzles. Under the assumption that the coupling between dark matter and the Standard Model particles is suppressed, such strongly…
One of the most puzzling problems of modern physics is the identification of the nature a non-relativistic matter component present in the universe, contributing to more than 25$\%$ of the total energy budget, known as Dark Matter. Weakly…
We study a generic model in which the dark sector is composed of a Majorana dark matter $\chi_1$, its excited state $\chi_2$, both at the electroweak scale, and a light dark photon $Z'$ with $m_{Z'} \sim 10^{-4}$ eV. The light $Z'$ enhances…
We show that the thermal relic abundance of dark matter can be affected by a new type of reaction: semi-annihilation. Semi-annihilation takes the schematic form X_i X_j -> X_k phi, where X_i are stable dark matter particles and phi is an…
We discuss a supersymmetric model for cogenesis of dark and baryonic matter where the dark matter (DM) has mass in the 8-10 GeV range as indicated by several direct detection searches including most recently the CDMS experiment with the…
We analyse the phenomenology of a simplified model for a real scalar dark matter candidate interacting with quarks via a coloured fermionic mediator. In the coannihilation regime, the dark matter abundance is controlled by the dynamics of…
The 'WIMP miracle' for the relic abundance of thermal dark matter motivates weak scale dark matter with renormalizable couplings to standard model particles. We study minimal models with such couplings that explain dark matter as a thermal…
We propose a new mechanism for thermal dark matter freezeout, termed Co-Decaying Dark Matter. Multi-component dark sectors with degenerate particles and out-of-equilibrium decays can co-decay to obtain the observed relic density. The dark…
We study dark matter (DM) models in which there are two dark sector particles, $\chi_1$ and $\chi_2$, of near mass. In such models, co-annihilation of $\chi_1$ and $\chi_2$ may be the dominant process controlling the DM relic density during…
Recently XENON1T Collaboration announced that they observed some excess in the electron recoil energy around a 2-3 keV. We show that this excess can be interpreted as exothermic scattering of excited dark matter (XDM), $XDM + e_{atomic}…
We summarize here our studies \cite{Chu:2022xuh,Chu:2023jyb,Chu:2024rrv} on two distinct scenarios for MeV-mass thermal dark matter freeze-out. First, we determine the minimal viable mass for dark matter below tens of MeV, considering…
Dark matter may be a thermal relic whose abundance is set by mutual annihilations among multiple species. Traditionally, this coannihilation scenario has been applied to weak scale dark matter that is highly degenerate with other states. We…
We present a self-interacting boosted dark matter (DM) scenario as a possible explanation of the recently reported excess of electron recoil events by the XENON1T experiment. The Standard Model (SM) has been extended with two vector-like…