Thermal squeezeout of dark matter

We carry out a detailed study of the confinement phase transition in a dark sector with a $SU(N)$ gauge group and a single generation of dark heavy quark. We focus on heavy enough quarks such that their abundance freezes out before the phase transition and the phase transition is of first-order....

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Asadi, Pouya, Kramer, Eric David, Kuflik, Eric, Ridgway, Gregory W, Slatyer, Tracy R, Smirnov, Juri
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society (APS) 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/142224
Description
Summary:We carry out a detailed study of the confinement phase transition in a dark sector with a $SU(N)$ gauge group and a single generation of dark heavy quark. We focus on heavy enough quarks such that their abundance freezes out before the phase transition and the phase transition is of first-order. We find that during this phase transition the quarks are trapped inside contracting pockets of the deconfined phase and are compressed enough to interact at a significant rate, giving rise to a second stage of annihilation that can dramatically change the resulting dark matter abundance. As a result, the dark matter can be heavier than the often-quoted unitarity bound of $\sim100~$TeV. Our findings are almost completely independent of the details of the portal between the dark sector and the Standard Model. We comment briefly on possible signals of such a sector. Our main findings are summarized in a companion letter, while here we provide further details on different parts of the calculation.