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arXiv · 1806.10139

SIMPs through the axion portal

Yonit Hochberg·Eric Kuflik·Robert McGehee·Hitoshi Murayama·Katelin Schutz
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Abstract

Dark matter could be a thermal relic comprised of strongly interacting massive particles (SIMPs), where $3 \rightarrow 2$ interactions set the relic abundance. Such interactions generically arise in theories of chiral symmetry breaking via the Wess-Zumino-Witten term. In this work, we show that an axion-like particle can successfully maintain kinetic equilibrium between the dark matter and the visible sector, allowing the requisite entropy transfer that is crucial for SIMPs to be a cold dark matter candidate. Constraints on this scenario arise from beam dump and collider experiments, from the cosmic microwave background, and from supernovae. We find a viable parameter space when the axion-like particle is close in mass to the SIMP dark matter, with strong-scale masses of order a few hundred MeV. Many planned experiments are set to probe the parameter space in the near future.

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Yonit Hochberg, Eric Kuflik, Robert McGehee, Hitoshi Murayama, Katelin Schutz. 2019-01-06. SIMPs through the axion portal. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.98.115031

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