Abstract
We investigate the thermal cosmology and terrestrial and astrophysical phenomenology of a sub-GeV hadrophilic dark sector. The specific construction explored in this work features a Dirac fermion dark matter candidate interacting with a light scalar mediator that dominantly couples to the up-quark. The correct freeze-out relic abundance may be achieved via dark matter annihilation directly to hadrons or through secluded annihilation to scalar mediators. A rich and distinctive phenomenology is present in this scenario, with probes arising from precision meson decays, proton beam dump experiments, colliders, direct detection experiments, supernovae, and nucleosynthesis. In the future, experiments such as NA62, REDTOP, SHiP, SBND, and NEWS-G will be able to explore a significant portion of the cosmologically motivated parameter space.
Highlights
The dark matter puzzle is among the most pressing problems in particle physics and cosmology today
A rich and distinctive phenomenology is present in this scenario, with probes arising from precision meson decays, proton beam dump experiments, colliders, direct detection experiments, supernovae, and nucleosynthesis
The standard renormalizable portals involving a dark Higgs boson, dark photon or sterile neutrino have been well-examined in the literature, but much work remains to be done in identifying and investigating viable models with even broader phenomenology
Summary
The dark matter puzzle is among the most pressing problems in particle physics and cosmology today. Besides kinetically mixed dark photons, a variety of mediators have been explored in the literature, including Higgs portal scalars [9,10], neutrino portal fermions [11,12,13,14,15,16,17], and vector bosons coupled to anomaly free currents [18,19,20,21,22,23], all of which have distinctive patterns of couplings to Standard Model (SM) particles and resulting phenomenology Such wide theoretical investigation is required to identify the full range of phenomena associated with dark sectors and discern the physics potential of proposed searches and new experiments with respect to existing constraints over a broad range of models and couplings. We have included an appendix which presents a description of the hadronic couplings for a general flavor-diagonal scalar mediator
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