Abstract
We explore the possibility that dark matter is a pair of vector-like fermionic SU(2)L doublets and propose a novel mechanism of dark matter production that proceeds through the confinement of the weak sector of the Standard Model. This confinement phase causes the Standard Model doublets and dark matter to confine into pions. The dark pions freeze-out before the weak sector deconfines and generate a relic abundance of dark matter. We solve the Boltzmann equations for this scenario to determine the scale of confinement and constituent dark matter mass required to produce the observed relic density. We determine which regions of this parameter space evade direct detection, collider bounds, and successfully produce the observed relic density of dark matter. For a TeV scale pair of vector-like fermionic SU(2)L doublets, we find the weak confinement scale to be ∼ 700 TeV.
Highlights
We explore the possibility that dark matter is a pair of vector-like fermionic SU(2)L doublets and propose a novel mechanism of dark matter production that proceeds through the confinement of the weak sector of the Standard Model
An SU(2)L-charged WIMP typically freezes out at a temperature M/20, which for an electroweak-sized mass corresponds to a period of cosmology that is much earlier than Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, and during an epoch that is relatively unconstrained by observational data
This article explores a non-standard cosmology that can dramatically change the favored mass range for an SU(2)L-charged WIMP, which makes up the bulk of the dark matter
Summary
Our dark matter production mechanism involves a temporary cosmological era of SU(2)L confinement. Weak confinement breaks the gauge symmetry of the Standard Model from SU(3)C × U(1)Y to SU(2)C × U(1)Q, resulting in four massless gauge bosons (G1,2,3, A ) and five massive gauge bosons, which can be arranged into a pair of complex gauge bosons (W ±) and single real vector boson (Z ). For the remainder of this section, we consider a simplified toy model consisting of one SM generation of fermionic doublets together with χ1 and χ2 (corresponding to Nf = 3, for which there are 14 broken generators of the SU(6) flavor symmetry). This allows us to extract the most important points in a framework that is simpler to analyze.
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