Search results for "Dark matter"
showing 10 items of 627 documents
Is a low-mass Z° in general SU (2) ⊗ U (1) gauge theories compatible with experiment?
1975
Abstract It is shown that any simple SU (2) ⊗ U (1) gauge theory with a Z° mass much lower than the W ± mass leads to serious conflicts with experiment. The case of deep inelastic neutral current reactions is discussed in greater detail.
Fracture processes studied in CRESST
2005
In the early stages of running of the CRESST dark matter search with sapphire crystals as detectors, an unexpectedly high rate of signal pulses appeared. Their origin was finally traced to fracture events in the sapphire due to the very tight clamping of the detectors. During extensive runs the energy and time of each event was recorded, providing large data sets for such phenomena. We believe this is the first time that the energy release in fracture has been accurately measured on a microscopic event-by-event basis. The energy distributions appear to follow a power law, dN/dE proportional to E-beta, similar to the Gutenberg-Richter power law for earthquake magnitudes, and after appropriat…
Majorons: a simultaneous solution to the large and small scale dark matter problems
1984
Abstract It is shown that the existence of majorons, which enable a heavy neutrino, 500 eV ≲ mνH ≲ 25 keV to decay into a light neutrino mνL ≲ 8 eV and a majoron, with lifetime 104 yr ≲ τνH ≲ 108 yr can solve both the large and small scale dark matter problems. For a primordial “Zeldovich” spectrum of fluctuations the limits are m v H ≲ 550 eV and τ v H > 107 to 108 yr (the ranges mνH ≲ eV and τνH ≳ 108 yr are allowed by the model but galaxy formation becomes problematic). The large scale dark matter problem is how to achieve the critical density as implied by inflation, the small scale problems deal with the halos of galaxies and galaxy formation and perturbation growth. The heavy neutrino…
Joint constraints on galaxy bias and σ8 through the N-pdf of the galaxy number density
2015
We present a full description of the N-probability density function of the galaxy number density fluctuations. This N-pdf is given in terms, on the one hand, of the cold dark matter correlations and, on the other hand, of the galaxy bias parameter. The method relies on the assumption commonly adopted that the dark matter density fluctuations follow a local non-linear transformation of the initial energy density perturbations. The N-pdf of the galaxy number density fluctuations allows for an optimal estimation of the bias parameter (e.g., via maximum-likelihood estimation, or Bayesian inference if there exists any a priori information on the bias parameter), and of those parameters defining …
Dark Matter Bound States from Three-Body Recombination
2020
The small-scale structure problems of the universe can be solved by self-interacting dark matter that becomes strongly interacting at low energies. A particularly predictive model is resonant short-range self-interactions, with a dark-matter mass of about 19 GeV and a large S-wave scattering length of about 17 fm. Such a model makes definite predictions for the few-body physics of weakly bound clusters of the dark-matter particles. We calculate the production of two-body bound clusters by three-body recombination in the early universe under the assumption that the dark matter particles are identical bosons, which is the most favorable case for forming larger clusters. The fraction of dark m…
Neutrino-dark matter connections in gauge theories
2019
We discuss the connection between the origin of neutrino masses and the properties of dark matter candidates in the context of gauge extensions of the Standard Model. We investigate minimal gauge theories for neutrino masses where the neutrinos are predicted to be Dirac or Majorana fermions. We find that the upper bound on the effective number of relativistic species provides a strong constraint in the scenarios with Dirac neutrinos. In the context of theories where the lepton number is a local gauge symmetry spontaneously broken at the low scale, the existence of dark matter is predicted from the condition of anomaly cancellation. Applying the cosmological bound on the dark matter relic de…
X-Ray Lines from Dark Matter Annihilation at the keV Scale.
2018
In 2014, several groups reported hints for a yet unidentified line in astrophysical x-ray signals from galaxies and galaxy clusters at an energy of 3.5 keV. While it is not unlikely that this line is simply a reflection of imperfectly modeled atomic transitions, it has renewed the community’s interest in models of keV-scale dark matter, whose decay would lead to such a line. The alternative possibility of dark matter annihilation into monochromatic photons is far less explored, a lapse that we strive to amend in this Letter. More precisely, we introduce a novel model of fermionic dark matter χ with O(keV) mass, annihilating to a scalar state ϕ which in turn decays to photons, for instance v…
Dark Matter Decay between Phase Transitions at the Weak Scale
2017
We propose a new alternative to the weakly interacting massive particle paradigm for dark matter. Rather than being determined by thermal freeze-out, the dark matter abundance in this scenario is set by dark matter decay, which is allowed for a limited amount of time just before the electroweak phase transition. More specifically, we consider fermionic singlet dark matter particles coupled weakly to a scalar mediator S_{3} and to auxiliary dark sector fields, charged under the standard model gauge groups. Dark matter freezes out while still relativistic, so its abundance is initially very large. As the Universe cools down, the scalar mediator develops a vacuum expectation value (VEV), which…
Shell-model study on event rates of lightest supersymmetric particles scattering offKr83andTe125
2016
We investigate the elastic and inelastic scattering of lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) dark matter off two possible target nuclei, $^{83}\mathrm{Kr}$ and $^{125}\mathrm{Te}$. For the nuclear-structure calculations, we employ the nuclear shell model using recently generated realistic interactions. We have condensed the nuclear-physics contribution to a set of nuclear-structure factors that are independent of the adopted supersymmetric (SUSY) model. Total event rates are then easily calculated by combining the nuclear-structure factors with SUSY parameters of choice. In particular, $^{125}\mathrm{Te}$ shows promise as a detector material with both the elastic and inelastic channels yie…
Probing photophobic axion and relaxion dark matter
2021
We investigate the interplay between early universe cosmology and dark matter direct detection, considering axion models with naturally suppressed couplings to photons. In the context of the cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale, we focus on a scenario of relaxion dark matter, in which the relaxion field constitutes all the observed dark matter relic density and its allowed mass range is fixed to a few keV by construction. In particular, we show that a relaxion particle with mass mϕ=3.0 keV which couples to electrons with gϕ,e=6.8×10−14 is consistent with the XENON1T excess, while accounting for the observed dark matter and satisfying astro/cosmo probes. This scenario uses the el…