Probing light dark matter with a hadrophilic scalar mediator

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. *

Glueball scattering cross section in lattice SU(2) Yang-Mills theory

“…While DM is less likely to be mainly composed of astrophysical objects [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], there are no particle physics candidates in the standard model (SM), and many models beyond it are under investigation [1,3,4,. The "weakly interacting massive particles miracle" [41,[86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94], i.e., the suggestive coincidence of the weak coupling and the DM density that would have thermally been generated with the latter as the interaction between ordinary matter and DM, motivated us to experimentally test their direct scattering [95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109], the DM decay to visible cosmic rays , and DM productions at collider experiments [98,, but no positive results have been reported so far.…”

Dark matter abundance from the sequential freeze-in mechanism

“…Assuming the above estimates of the loop-induced couplings, we find however that the rates for energy transfer 2 A recent study showed the importance of the thermal mass for DM production from thermal photon decays [41]. 3 A similar model was considered in [43] and flavor issues in this class of models were addressed in [44,45].…”

Dark matter models and direct detection

“…For example, see Refs. [67,121] for a scalar which couples to top quarks only or up quarks only. Ref.…”

“…The result for the lowest masses was achieved using a 0.5 g sapphirecrystal (Al 2 O 3 ) with a threshold of 20 eV. The cryogenic crystal was operated above ground without significant shielding for 2.27 hours, the background level in the region of interest was 1.2 ⇥ 10 5 events/(kg ⇥ d ⇥ keV ee ) [121]. In a small window around 0.5-06 GeV/c 2 the best exclusion limit around 3 ⇥ 10 37 cm 2 is from NEWS-G, a spherical proportional counter with 60 cm diameter and filled with a Ne+CH 4 (0.7%) gas-mixture at 3.1 bar (corresponding to 283 g) [122].…”