Right-handed neutrinos with MeV to GeV mass are very promising candidates for dark matter (DM). Not only can they solve the missing satellite puzzle, the cusp-core problem of inner DM density profiles, and the too-big-to fail problem, {\it i.e.} that the unobserved satellites are too big to not have visible stars, but they can also account for the Standard Model (SM) neutrino masses at one loop. We perform a comprehensive study of the right-handed neutrino parameter space and impose the correct observed relic density and SM neutrino mass differences and mixings. We find that the DM masses are in agreement with bounds from big-bang nucleosynthesis, but that these constraints induce sizeable DM couplings to the charged SM leptons. We then point out that previously overlooked limits from current and future lepton flavour violation experiments such as MEG and SINDRUM heavily constrain the allowed parameter space. Since the DM is leptophilic, we also investigate electron recoil as a possible direct detection signal, in particular in the XENON1T experiment. We find that despite the large coupling and low backgrounds, the energy thresholds are still too high and the predicted cross sections too low due to the heavy charged mediator, whose mass is constrained by LEP limits.
We describe SuperIso Relic, a public program for the calculation of dark matter relic density and direct and indirect detection rates, which includes in addition the SuperIso routines for the calculation of flavour physics observables. SuperIso Relic v4 incorporates many new features, namely the possibility of multiprocessor calculation of the relic density, new cosmological models, and the implementations of the calculation of the observables related to direct and indirect detection experiments. Furthermore, the new version includes an implementation of the nuclear and astrophysical uncertain…
We study a simplified model of top-flavoured dark matter in the framework of Dark Minimal Flavour Violation. In this setup the coupling of the dark matter flavour triplet to right-handed up-type quarks constitutes the only new source of flavour and CP violation. The parameter space of the model is restricted by LHC searches with missing energy final states, by neutral $D$ meson mixing data, by the observed dark matter relic abundance, and by the absence of signal in direct detection experiments. We consider all of these constraints in turn, studying their implications for the allowed parameter…
Testing Dark Matter Coscattering with the High-Energy LZ Recoil
Durham University(杜伦大学);Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology(粒子物理现象学研究所);Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata(印度加尔各答科学教育与研究学院)
Relic neutrino decoupling including flavour oscillations
在早期宇宙中,当电子-正电子对湮灭时,中微子会发生轻微耦合,并将它们的熵转移给光子。这一过程产生了中微子光谱的非热畸变,这种畸变取决于中微子的味道,nu_e的畸变比nu_mu或nu_tau的大。通过求解中微子谱的动量相关动力学方程,研究了三中微子味振荡对中微子退耦过程的影响。我们发现,振荡并没有从本质上改变中微子能量密度的总变化,以中微子的有效数计算,N_eff=3.046,而对原始4 He的产生的微小影响增加了O(20%),高达2.1 x 10^{-4}。这些结果是稳定的中微子混合参数目前有利的区域内。
Measuring dark matter (DM) signals via electron recoil provides an important means for direct detection of light DM particles. The recent XENON1T anomaly with electron recoil energy around $\,E_R^{}\!=\!(2-3)$keV can be naturally explained by DM inelastic scattering which injects energy to the recoiled electrons and gives a narrow peak structure in the recoil spectrum. We present an effective field theory (EFT) approach to exothermic inelastic DM signals for the Xenon electron recoil detection. For relatively heavy mediator, we fairly formulate the DM-lepton interactions by effective contact o…
The identity of dark matter is being sought with increasingly sensitive and voluminous underground detectors. Recently the XENON1T collaboration reported excess electronic recoil events, with most of these having recoil energies around $1-30$ keV. We show that a straightforward model of inelastic dark matter produced via early universe thermal freeze-out annihilation can account for the XENON1T excess. Remarkably, this dark matter model consists of a few simple elements: sub-GeV mass Dirac fermion dark matter coupled to a lighter dark photon kinetically mixed with the Standard Model photon. A …
We study the decoupling process of neutrinos in the early universe in the presence of three-flavour oscillations. The evolution of the neutrino spectra is found by solving the corresponding momentum-dependent kinetic equations for the neutrino density matrix, including for the first time the proper collision integrals for both diagonal and off-diagonal elements. This improved calculation modifies the evolution of the off-diagonal elements of the neutrino density matrix and changes the deviation from equilibrium of the frozen neutrino spectra. However, it does not vary the contribution of neutr…
We present the first exact and most general neutralino-neutralino annihilation cross sections in the presence of flavor violation. The existing set of calculations in literature do not include flavour violation. These calculations are important for the calculation of relic density and indirect detection of dark matter in various experiments.
We propose models of Dark Matter that account for the 511 keV photon emission from the Galactic Centre, compatibly with experimental constraints and theoretical consistency, and where the relic abundance is achieved via p-wave annihilations or, in inelastic models, via co-annihilations. Due to the Dark Matter component that is inevitably upscattered by the Sun, these models generically predict keV electron recoils at detectors on Earth, and could naturally explain the excess recently reported by the XENON1T collaboration. The very small number of free parameters make these ideas testable by de…
We investigate Majorana dark matter in a new variant of $U(1)_{L_μ-L_τ}$ gauge extension of Standard Model, containing three additional neutral fermions $N_{e}, N_μ, N_τ$, along with a $(\bar{3},1,1/3)$ scalar Leptoquark (SLQ) and an inert doublet, to study the phenomenology of dark matter, neutrino mass generation and flavour anomalies on a single platform. The lightest mass eigenstate of the $N_μ, N_τ$ neutral fermions plays the role of dark matter. We compute the WIMP-nucleon cross section in leptoquark portal and the relic density mediated by inert doublet components, leptoquark and the ne…
Explaining the LZ High-Energy Recoil Event with Inelastic Sneutrino Dark Matter in Supersymmetry
Henan Institute of Science and Technology(河南科技大学);Centre for Theoretical Physics, Henan Normal University(河南师范大学理论物理中心);Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院理论物理研究所)
We present a class of models in which dark matter (DM) is a fermionic singlet under the Standard Model (SM) gauge group but is charged under a symmetry of flavour that acts as well on the SM fermions. Interactions between DM and SM particles are mediated by the scalar fields that spontaneously break the flavour symmetry, the so-called flavons. In the case of gauged flavour symmetries, the interactions are also mediated by the flavour gauge bosons. We first discuss the construction and the generic features of this class of models. Then a concrete example with an abelian flavour symmetry is cons…
We describe a hybrid model in which the light neutrino mass matrix receives both tree-level seesaw and loop-induced contributions. An additional U(1) gauge symmetry is used to stabilize the lightest right-handed neutrino as the Dark Matter candidate. After fitting the experimental neutrino data, we analyze and correlate the phenomenological consequences of the model, namely its impact on electroweak precision measurements, the Dark Matter relic abundance, lepton flavour violating rare decays and neutrinoless double beta decay. We find that natural realizations of the model characterized by lar…
We develop the phenomenology of scenarios in which a dark matter candidate interacts with a top quark through flavour-changing couplings, employing a simplified dark matter model with an s-channel vector-like mediator. We study in detail the top-charm flavour-changing interaction, by investigating the single top plus large missing energy signature at the LHC as well as constraints from the relic density and direct and indirect dark matter detection experiments. We present strategies to distinguish between the top-charm and top-up flavour-changing models by taking advantage of the lepton charge…
We discuss a flavourful $Z'$ portal model with a coupling to fourth-family singlet Dirac neutrino dark matter. In the absence of mixing, the $Z'$ is fermiophobic, having no couplings to the three chiral families, but does couple to a fourth vector-like family. Due to mixing effects, the $Z'$ gets induced couplings to second family left-handed lepton doublets and third family left-handed quark doublets. This model can simultaneously account for the measured $B$-decay ratios $R_{K}$ and $R_{K^*}$ and for the observed relic abundance of dark matter. We identify the parameter space where this expl…
The Standard Cosmological Model predicts the existence of relic neutrinos, which are indirectly probed through the effective number of relativistic species in the early Universe. In addition, from neutrino flavour oscillations we know that at least two of the neutrino mass states have a non-zero mass. Since the expansion of the Universe has diluted the energy of relic neutrinos, those that are massive are also non relativistic today. This means that they can be trapped in strong gravitational potentials, such as the one of the Milky Way. We review the calculation of the local overdensity of re…
SuperIso Relic is a public computing program for the calculation of flavour observables and relic density in supersymmetry (MSSM and NMSSM). We present new extensions of the code dedicated to the calculation of dark matter direct and indirect detection constraints from the latest experimental results. Contrary to most of the existing programs, this new version allows the user to consider straightforwardly the uncertainties related to nuclear form factors, dark matter density and velocity, as well as cosmic-ray propagation through the galactic medium. The user thus finds a direct way to calcula…
Dark matter may reside in sector without Standard Model (SM) gauge interactions. One way in which such a dark sector can still impact SM particles through non-gravitational interactions is via the "photon portal" in which a dark photon kinetically mixes with the ordinary SM photon. We study the implications of this setup for electron recoil events at TEXONO reactor and nuclear recoil events at the COHERENT experiment. We find that the recent COHERENT data rules out previously allowed regions of parameter space favored by the thermal relic hypothesis for the DM abundance. When mapped onto the D…
The XENON1T dark matter experiment recently reported 0.65 ton-year exposure measurement on electron recoils , which shows an excess in $2\sim 3$ KeV recoils above the detector background. In this paper we present a Pseudo-Dirac dark matter scenario to explain the excess via inelastic dark matter-electron scattering. With a KeV scale mass splitting between the two components of the Pseudo-Dirac dark matter, the slightly excited component can down-scatter on electrons. The desired dark matter masses are about 10 GeV with a 4 KeV mass-splitting and unity coupling to electrons, which generate the …
We propose measurements of weighted differences of the angular observables in the rare decays $B \to K^*\ell^+\ell^-$. The proposed observables are very sensitive to the difference between the Wilson coefficients $\mathcal{C}_9^{(e)}$ and $\mathcal{C}_9^{(μ)}$ for decays into electrons and muons, respectively. At the same time, the charm-induced hadronic contributions are kinematically suppressed to $\lesssim 7\% (4\%)$ in the region $1\,$GeV$^2 \leq q^2 \leq 6\,$GeV$^2$, as long as LFU breaking occurs only in $\mathcal{C}^{(\ell)}_{9}$. This suppression becomes stronger for the region of low …
Effect of inelastic scalar dark matter in hidden $U(1)$ scenario after the LZ nuclear recoil
Institute for Academic Innovation, Hokkaido University(北海道大学学术创新研究所);Department of Physics, Hokkaido University(北海道大学物理系);College of Physics, Sichuan University(四川大学物理学院)
We propose a model based on the interplay between the type-II seesaw and scotogenic neutrino mass generation mechanisms. The setup features a $\mathbb{Z}_8$ discrete flavour symmetry which is broken down to a residual $\mathbb{Z}_2$ responsible for stabilising dark matter. A singlet scalar field is introduced to implement spontaneous CP violation. The effective neutrino mass matrix two-texture zero structure leads to sharp neutrino sector predictions. We analyse the constraints imposed on the model by current and future charged lepton flavour violation experiments. This framework provides two …
The neutrino mass and dark matter (DM) problems are addressed in a Standard Model extension where the type-II seesaw and scotogenic mechanisms coexist. The model features a flavour $\mathcal{Z}_8$ discrete symmetry which is broken down to a $\mathcal{Z}_2$, stabilising the (scalar or fermion) DM particle. Spontaneous CP violation is implemented through the complex vacuum expectation value of a singlet scalar field, inducing observable CP-violating effects in the lepton sector. The structure of the effective neutrino mass matrix leads to constraints on the low-energy neutrino observables, namel…
A Freeze-In Interpretation of the LZ High-Energy Nuclear Recoil Event
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen(哥廷根大学);Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies(都柏林高等研究院);Helsinki Institute of Physics, Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2a, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland(赫尔辛基物理研究所);Lund University(隆德大学);Universidade de Aveiro(阿威罗大学);Universidade do Minho(米尼奥大学)
We consider a novel mechanism to realize exothermic dark matter with dark mesons in the limit of approximate flavor symmetry in a dark QCD. We introduce a local dark $U(1)'$ symmetry to communicate between dark mesons and the Standard Model via $Z'$ portal by partially gauging the dark flavor symmetry with flavor-dependent charges for cancelling chiral anomalies in the dark sector. After the dark local $U(1)'$ is broken spontaneously by the VEV of a dark Higgs, there appear small mass splittings between dark quarks, consequently, leading to small split masses for dark mesons, required to expla…
We present an $A_4$ flavor extended $\rm B-L$ model for realization of eV scale sterile neutrinos, motivated by the recent experimental hints from both particle physics and cosmology. The framework considered here is a gauged $\rm B-L$ extension of standard model without the introduction of right-handed neutrinos, where the gauge triangle anomalies are canceled with the inclusion of three exotic neutral fermions $N_{i}$ ($i=1,2,3$) with $\rm B-L$ charges $-4,-4$ and $5$. The usual Dirac Yukawa couplings between the SM neutrinos and the exotic fermions are absent and thus, the model allows natu…
We study CP-conserving non-minimal flavour violation in $A_4 \times SU(5)$ inspired Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), focussing on the regions of parameter space where dark matter is successfully accommodated due to a light right-handed smuon a few GeV heavier than the lightest neutralino. In this region of parameter space we find that some of the flavour-violating parameters are constrained by the requirement of the dark matter relic density, due to the delicate interplay between the smuon and neutralino masses. By scanning over GUT scale flavour violating parameters, constrained …