Breaking the Dark Force

TL;DR

This paper constructs a supersymmetric dark matter model with GeV-scale gauge bosons, explaining cosmic ray anomalies and experimental signals through a hierarchy of scales and specific SUSY-breaking mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides an explicit SUSY-based model that naturally generates GeV-scale dark sector masses and explores its phenomenological and cosmological implications.

Findings

The model explains PAMELA and ATIC electron/positron excesses via Sommerfeld enhancement.

It accounts for INTEGRAL and DAMA anomalies with co-existing dark matter species.

The collider signals are not guaranteed in this SUSY framework.

Abstract

Recently Arkani-Hamed, Finkbeiner, Slatyer and Weiner proposed a unified explanation to the set of experimental and observational anomalies with possible connections to Dark Matter (DM). A central role is played by GeV scale "dark" gauge bosons exchanged by the weak scale DM. Motivated by this proposal, we build an explicit model of DM in the context of Weak Scale Supersymmetry (SUSY). We employ high-scale SUSY-breaking and invoke the Giudice-Masiero mechanism to generate the weak scale DM masses. By sequestering the dark sector from the SUSY-breaking "hidden" sector, it naturally acquires GeV scale soft masses that help generate the dark gauge boson mass. The visible MSSM sector is not fully sequestered and acquires gaugino-mediated soft terms at the weak scale. This hierarchy of scales naturally leads to the Sommerfeld enhancement of DM annihilations needed to account for the electron/positron excesses in the PAMELA and ATIC experiments. The possibility of co-existing species of DM is used to show how the INTEGRAL and DAMA anomalies can both be explained. We study the cosmological constraints on the new stable or long-lived light particles that appear in our models. We discuss the lepton-jet collider signals suggested by Arkani-Hamed and Weiner, and find that they are not guaranteed in our construction.