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Dark matter as a heavy thermal hot relic

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arxiv 2003.04936 v2 pith:UM3EUGXZ submitted 2020-03-10 hep-ph

Dark matter as a heavy thermal hot relic

classification hep-ph
keywords darkmatterthermalmassrelicbathmodeldensity
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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abstract

If, during the early Universe epoch, the dark matter particle thermalizes in a hidden sector which does not thermalize with the Standard Model thermal bath, its relativistic thermal decoupling can easily lead to the observed relic density, even if the dark matter particle mass is many orders of magnitude heavier than the usual $\sim$ eV hot relic mass scale. This straightforward scenario simply requires that the temperature of the hidden sector thermal bath is one to five orders of magnitude cooler than the temperature of the Standard Model thermal bath. In this way the resulting relic density turns out to be determined only by the dark matter mass scale and the ratio of the temperatures of both sectors. In a model independent way we determine that this can work for a dark matter mass all the way from $\sim 1$ keV to $\sim 30$ PeV. We also show how this scenario works explicitly in the framework of two illustrative models. One of them can lead to a PeV neutrino flux from dark matter decay of the order of the one needed to account for the high energy neutrinos observed by IceCube.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

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