Thermal Squeezeout of Dark Matter and local Accidental Asymmetry

by Juri Smirnov (Ohio State University, CCAPP)

Thursday 10 Mar 2022, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

I will discuss  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 ∼ 100 TeV.

Finally I will show a concrete example where the link between the dark sector and the standard model is facilitated by a simple Z’ model.

CERN Thermal Squeezeout of Dark Matter.pdf