A theory for scotogenic dark matter stabilised by residual gauge symmetry

Abstract

Dark matter stability can result from a residual matter-parity symmetry, following naturally from the spontaneous breaking of the gauge symmetry. Here we explore this idea in the context of the SU(3)c⊗SU(3)L⊗U(1)X⊗U(1)N electroweak extension of the standard model. The key feature of our new scotogenic dark matter theory is the use of a triplet scalar boson with anti-symmetric Yukawa couplings. This naturally implies that one of the light neutrinos is massless and, as a result, there is a lower bound for the 0νββ decay rate.