Kinetic Equilibrium between SIMP Dark Matter and Radiation via Internal Bremsstrahlung

Abstract

As an alternative to standard dark matter freeze-out via two-body annihilation, strongly interacting massive particles are proposed to regulate their relic abundance through three/four-body self-annihilation. During such freeze-out, dark matter must undergo both number reduction and energy dissipation. The former requires number-reducing processes, and the latter requires an efficient energy-dissipation mechanism. In this work, we propose a novel mechanism where internal Bremsstrahlung processes establish kinetic equilibrium between dark matter and radiation, and thus dissipate energy. More appealingly, this mechanism can be naturally realized in a class of strong dynamics models with flavor-universal quarks and a light axion. To demonstrate our results in a $Sp(4)_c$ dark-color model, we compute all relevant interaction terms and numerically solve the full Boltzmann equations. The same mechanism can also be applied to vector dark matter models.