Impact of first-order phase transitions on dark matter production in the scotogenic model

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the effects of first-order phase transitions on the singlet fermionic dark matter in the scotogenic model. It is known that this dark matter candidate tends to conflict with the relevant constraints such as the neutrino oscillation data and charged lepton flavor violating processes if its thermal production mechanism is assumed. We find that the dark matter production mechanisms are modified by first-order phase transitions at some specific parameter regions, where the phase transitions can be one-step or two-step depending on the parameters. If the phase transition is one-step, a sufficiently low nucleation temperature is required to reproduce the observed relic abundance of dark matter. If the phase transition is two-step, the dark matter should never be thermalized, otherwise the abundance would remain too much and overclose the universe. This is because the nucleation temperature cannot be low as in the one-step case. Therefore we require another way of dark matter production, the freeze-in mechanism for the two-step case. We show that the freeze-in mechanism is modified by the temporary vacuum expectation value of the inert scalar field. In both cases, the first-order phase transitions could produce observable gravitational wave spectra. In particular for the one-step phase transition, the generated gravitational waves with sizable energy density are intrinsically correlated with the dark matter production mechanism, and can be detectable by future space-based interferometers.

28 pages, 11 figures, version to appear in JHEP

References in corpus (16)

• Gravitational Wave Production by Collisions: More Bubbles
• The Well-Tempered Neutralino
• Gravitational wave generation from bubble collisions in first-order phase transitions: an analytic approach
• Gravitational waves from stochastic relativistic sources: primordial turbulence and magnetic fields
• Observing the Dark Scalar Doublet and its Impact on the Standard-Model Higgs Boson at Colliders
• Inert Doublet Model and LEP II Limits
• Cold Dark Matter, Radiative Neutrino Mass, mu to e gamma, and Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay
• Natural Dark Matter from an Unnatural Higgs Boson and New Colored Particles at the TeV Scale
• Strong First Order Electroweak Phase Transition in the CP-Conserving 2HDM Revisited
• Reconciliation of CDM abundance and $\mu \to e\gamma$ in a radiative seesaw model
• Detectability of Gravitational Waves from Phase Transitions
• Right-Handed Sneutrino as Cold Dark Matter of the Universe
• FIMP realization of the scotogenic model
• Probing the scotogenic FIMP at the LHC
• Strong electroweak phase transition in $t$-channel simplified dark matter models
• Electric dipole moments in the extended scotogenic models