Impact of bound states on non-thermal dark matter production

Abstract

We explore the impact of non-perturbative effects, namely Sommerfeld enhancement and bound state formation, on the cosmological production of non-thermal dark matter. For this purpose, we focus on a class of simplified models with t-channel mediators. These naturally combine the requirements for large corrections in the early Universe, i.e. beyond the Standard Model states with long range interactions, with a sizable new physics production cross section at the LHC. We find that the dark matter yield of the superWIMP mechanism is suppressed considerably due to the non-perturbative effects under consideration. This leads to a significant shift in the cosmologically preferred parameter space of non-thermal dark matter in these models. We also revisit the implications of LHC bounds on long-lived particles associated with non-thermal dark matter and find that testing this scenario at the LHC is a bigger challenge than previously anticipated.

27 pages, 3 figures, 3 appendices, single column

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Strong electroweak phase transition in $t$-channel simplified dark matter models
• Excited bound states and their role in dark matter production
• Bound-state formation, dissociation and decays of darkonium with potential non-relativistic Yukawa theory for scalar and pseudoscalar mediators
• The role of unitarisation on dark-matter freeze-out via metastable bound states