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Making dark matter out of light: Freeze-in from plasma effects

Cora Dvorkin, Tongyan Lin, and Katelin Schutz
Phys. Rev. D 99, 115009 – Published 11 June 2019; Erratum Phys. Rev. D 105, 119901 (2022)

Abstract

Dark matter (DM) could couple to particles in the Standard Model (SM) through a light vector mediator. In the limit of small coupling, this portal could be responsible for producing the observed DM abundance through a mechanism known as freeze-in. Furthermore, the requisite DM-SM couplings provide a concrete benchmark for direct and indirect searches for DM. We present updated calculations of the relic abundance for DM produced by freeze-in through a light vector mediator. We identify an additional production channel: the decay of photons that acquire an in-medium plasma mass. These plasmon decays are a dominant channel for DM production for sub-MeV DM masses, and including this channel leads to a significant reduction in the predicted signal strength for DM searches. Accounting for production from both plasmon decays and annihilations of SM fermions, the DM acquires a highly nonthermal phase-space distribution which impacts the cosmology at later times; these cosmological effects will be explored in a companion paper.

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  • Received 15 March 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.115009

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Particles & FieldsGravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Erratum

Erratum: Making dark matter out of light: Freeze-in from plasma effects [Phys. Rev. D 99, 115009 (2019)]

Cora Dvorkin, Tongyan Lin, and Katelin Schutz
Phys. Rev. D 105, 119901 (2022)

Authors & Affiliations

Cora Dvorkin1,*, Tongyan Lin2,†, and Katelin Schutz3,‡

  • 1Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 2Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, California 92093, USA
  • 3Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

  • *cdvorkin@g.harvard.edu
  • tongyan@physics.ucsd.edu
  • kschutz@berkeley.edu

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Issue

Vol. 99, Iss. 11 — 1 June 2019

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