Probing the Cosmological Constant and Phase Transitions with Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates how early universe phase transitions and the cosmological constant influence the relic abundance of TeV-scale dark matter, highlighting subtle effects and potential tuning requirements.

Contribution

It introduces a parameterization of phase transition effects on dark matter relic abundance, including vacuum energy and the cosmological constant, within the Standard Model framework.

Findings

Vacuum energy affects dark matter relic abundance at sub-percent level.

Strong first order phase transitions can lead to order-one corrections.

Potential tuning of couplings can amplify vacuum energy effects.

Abstract

The Standard Model and its extensions predict multiple phase transitions in the early universe. In addition to the electroweak phase transition, one or several of these could occur at energies close to the weak scale. Such phase transitions can leave their imprint on the relic abundance of TeV-scale dark matter. In this paper, we enumerate several physical features of a generic phase transition and parameterize the effect of each on the relic abundance. In particular, we include among these effects the presence of the scalar field vacuum energy and the cosmological constant, which is sensitive to UV physics. Within the context of the Standard Model Higgs sector, we find that the relic abundance of generic TeV-scale dark matter is affected by the vacuum energy at the order of a fraction of a percent. For scalar field sectors with strong first order phase transitions, an order one percent apparent tuning of coupling constants may allow corrections induced by the vacuum energy to be of order unity.