Speaker
Nirmal Raj
(Notre Dame)
Description
Of the three notable exceptions to the standard calculation of dark matter freezeout, namely co-annihilation, resonant annihilation and forbidden annihilation, the third is the least explored in the literature. Here DM annihilates to states heavier than itself, therefore the thermal annihilation cross-section is set by averaging over the tail of its velocity distribution. (At zero temperature, this process is kinematically forbidden.) We construct simplified DM models to verify and demonstrate the feasibility of "forbidden WIMPs": weak scale DM annihilating to SM final states. Relevant limits and prospects will be presented.
Author
Nirmal Raj
(Notre Dame)
Co-authors
Adam Orion Martin
(University of Notre Dame (US))
Antonio Delgado
(University of Notre Dame)