Probing the Cosmological Constant and Phase Transitions with Dark Matter

Abstract

The Standard Model and its extensions predict multiple phase transitions in the early universe. In addition to the electroweak phase transition, one or several of these could occur at energies close to the weak scale. Such phase transitions can leave their imprint on the relic abundance of TeV-scale dark matter. In this paper, we enumerate several physical features of a generic phase transition and parameterize the effect of each on the relic abundance. In particular, we include among these effects the presence of the scalar field vacuum energy and the cosmological constant, which is sensitive to UV physics. Within the context of the Standard Model Higgs sector, we find that the relic abundance of generic TeV-scale dark matter is affected by the vacuum energy at the order of a fraction of a percent. For scalar field sectors with strong first order phase transitions, an order one percent apparent tuning of coupling constants may allow corrections induced by the vacuum energy to be of order unity.

17 pages, 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Filtered Dark Matter at a First Order Phase Transition
• Fermi-ball dark matter from a first-order phase transition
• Ultra-relativistic bubbles from the simplest Higgs portal and their cosmological consequences
• Miniclusters in the Axiverse
• Strongly First Order Phase Transitions Near an Enhanced Discrete Symmetry Point
• Phase Transitions and Gauge Artifacts in an Abelian Higgs Plus Singlet Model
• Filtered pseudo-scalar dark matter and gravitational waves from first order phase transition
• Cosmological Constant, Dark Matter, and Electroweak Phase Transition
• Secluded Dark Matter Coupled to a Hidden CFT
• Dilution of dark matter relic density in singlet extension models
• Non-thermal production of heavy vector dark matter from relativistic bubble walls