Relic density of dark matter in the inert doublet model beyond leading order: The heavy mass case

Abstract

A full renormalisation of the Inert Doublet Model (IDM) is presented and exploited for a precise calculation of the relic density of Dark Matter (DM) at one-loop. In this first paper, we study the case of a DM candidate with $m_{\rm DM} \sim 500$ GeV. In this regime, the co-annihilation channels are important. We therefore compute, for a wide range of relative velocities, the full next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to 7 annihilation/co-annihilation processes that contribute $\sim$ 70\% to the relic density of DM. These corrected cross-sections are interfaced with {\tt micrOMEGAs} to obtain the one-loop correction to the freeze-out relic density. Due to the accurate measurement of this observable, the one-loop corrections are relevant. We discuss the one-loop renormalisation scheme dependence and point out the influence, at one-loop, of a parameter that solely describes the scattering in the dark sector. A tree-level computation of the relic density is not sensitive to this parameter.