Abstract
First order phase transitions can leave relic pockets of false vacua and their particles, that manifest as macroscopic Dark Matter. We compute one predictive model: a gauge theory with a dark quark relic heavier than the confinement scale. During the first order phase transition to confinement, dark quarks remain in the false vacuum and get compressed, forming Fermi balls that can undergo gravitational collapse to stable dark dwarfs (bound states analogous to white dwarfs) near the Chandrasekhar limit, or primordial black holes.
Highlights
If relic dark quarks are heavy enough that their gravity becomes relevant, after the initial stage of compression, a gravitational collapse can take over and lead to a new kind of macroscopic DM relic
During the first order phase transition to confinement, dark quarks remain in the false vacuum and get compressed, forming Fermi balls that can undergo gravitational collapse to stable dark dwarfs near the Chandrasekhar limit, or primordial black holes
Particles which are lighter in a false vacuum than in the SM vacuum could get trapped so that pockets of false vacua and their compressed light particles could survive within our universe, and be its Dark Matter
Summary
A key element of the scenario is a first-order phase transition. We consider a non-Abelian gauge group G with Nf flavours of Dirac fermionic quarks lighter than the confinement scale Λ. We focus on G = SU(N ), so that it is known when non-perturbative gauge interactions give a first order confinement phase transition [22,23,24,25]: Nf = 0 or 3 ≤ Nf 3N. For Nf > 0 the order of the phase transition can be computed analytically from coefficients of RG equations in the pion effective theory [26], as well as from lattice simulations. Quarks in the false deconfined vacuum are lighter than hadrons in the confined true vacuum. We will mention a new possibility in section 4: pockets of light dark quarks in the color superconducting phase. Self-gravity of pockets is negligible here, as light dark quarks have the same density of dark gluons.
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