Dark QCD Matters

Abstract

We investigate the nightmare scenario of dark sectors that are made of non-abelian gauge theories with fermions, gravitationally coupled to the Standard Model (SM). While testing these scenarios is experimentally challenging, they are strongly motivated by the accidental stability of dark baryons and pions, that explain the cosmological stability of dark matter (DM). We study the production of these sectors which are minimally populated through gravitational freeze-in, leading to a dark sector temperature much lower than the SM, or through inflaton decay, or renormalizable interactions producing warmer DM. Despite having only gravitational couplings with the SM these scenarios turn out to be rather predictive depending roughly on three parameters: the dark sector temperature, the confinement scale and the dark pion mass. In particular, when the initial temperature is comparable to the SM one these scenarios are very constrained by structure formation, $\Delta N_{\mathrm{eff}}$ and limits on DM self-interactions. Dark sectors with same temperature or warmer than SM are typically excluded.

arXiv comment34 pages, 3 figures. v2) gravity wave frequency from dark phase transition modified, refs added + minor changes

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Cited by in corpus (16)

• Supercool Composite Dark Matter Beyond 100 TeV
• Dark Matter or Regular Matter in Neutron Stars? How to tell the difference from the coalescence of compact objects
• Mirror QCD phase transition as the origin of the nanohertz Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background
• Turn up the volume: Listening to phase transitions in hot dark sectors
• Dark Photon Dark Matter without Stueckelberg Mass
• Low-energy effective description of dark $Sp(4)$ theories
• High Quality QCD Axion at Gravitational Wave Observatories
• Glueballs in a Thermal Squeezeout Model
• Maximal temperature of strongly-coupled dark sectors
• Dark matter self-interactions in the matter power spectrum
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• Apparent $w<-1$ and a Lower $S_8$ from Dark Axion and Dark Baryons Interactions
• Neutron Portal and Dark Matter-Baryon Coincidence: from UV Completion to Phenomenology