Higgs portal majorana fermionic dark matter with the freeze-in mechanism

Abstract

Abstract We consider a minimal model of fermionic dark matter (DM), in which the Majorana fermion DM χ couples with the Standard Model (SM) Higgs field H through a higher-dimensional term $-{\cal L}\supset H^\dagger H \bar{\chi }\chi /\Lambda$, where Λ is the cutoff scale. We assume that Λ is sufficiently large that DM particles are not in thermal equilibrium with the SM particles throughout the history of the universe. Hence, DM particles are produced only by the freeze-in mechanism. Through a numerical analysis of the freeze-in mechanism, we show contour plots of the DM relic abundance for various values of the DM mass, reheating temperature, and the cutoff scale. We obtain an upper bound of the DM mass and cutoff scale from contour plots on the (mχ, Λ)-plane. We also consider direct DM detection for the parameter regions where the DM relic abundance is consistent with the experimental values. We find that the spin-independent cross section for the elastic scattering with a nucleon is below the current experimental upper bound.