Thermal squeezeout of dark matter
Author(s)
Asadi, Pouya; Kramer, Eric David; Kuflik, Eric; Ridgway, Gregory W; Slatyer, Tracy R; Smirnov, Juri; ... Show more Show less
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We carry out a detailed study of the confinement phase transition in a dark
sector with a $SU(N)$ gauge group and a single generation of dark heavy quark.
We focus on heavy enough quarks such that their abundance freezes out before
the phase transition and the phase transition is of first-order. We find that
during this phase transition the quarks are trapped inside contracting pockets
of the deconfined phase and are compressed enough to interact at a significant
rate, giving rise to a second stage of annihilation that can dramatically
change the resulting dark matter abundance. As a result, the dark matter can be
heavier than the often-quoted unitarity bound of $\sim100~$TeV. Our findings
are almost completely independent of the details of the portal between the dark
sector and the Standard Model. We comment briefly on possible signals of such a
sector. Our main findings are summarized in a companion letter, while here we
provide further details on different parts of the calculation.
Date issued
2021Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical PhysicsJournal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Citation
Asadi, Pouya, Kramer, Eric David, Kuflik, Eric, Ridgway, Gregory W, Slatyer, Tracy R et al. 2021. "Thermal squeezeout of dark matter." Physical Review D, 104 (9).
Version: Final published version