Effective Theory for Dark Matter and a New Force in the Dark Matter Sector

Abstract

An effective theory for dark matter has recently been proposed. The key assumption is that the dark matter particle which is a Dirac fermion is protected from decaying by a global U(1) symmetry. We point out that quantum gravity effects will violate this symmetry and that the dark matter candidate thus decays very fast. In order to solve that problem, we propose to consider a local gauge symmetry which implies a new force in the dark matter sector. It is likely that this new local U(1) symmetry will need to be spontaneously broken leading for a range of the parameters of the model to a Sommerfeld enhancement of the annihilation cross-sections which is useful to explain the Pamela and ATIC results using a weakly interacting massive particle with a mass in the TeV range.

6 pages

References in corpus (7)

• Observation of an anomalous positron abundance in the cosmic radiation
• A Theory of Dark Matter
• Gauge Singlet Scalars as Cold Dark Matter
• Laser experiments explore the hidden sector
• Microwave Background Constraints on Mixing of Photons with Hidden Photons
• Probing Hidden Sector Photons through the Higgs Window
• Dark matter and sub-GeV hidden U(1) in GMSB models