Planck-scale effects on WIMP dark matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Planck-scale physics-induced global symmetry violations impact WIMP dark matter, showing potential for cosmologically viable lifetimes and enhanced indirect detection signals.

Contribution

It introduces an effective framework to analyze Planck-scale effects on WIMP stability and detection, highlighting new decay channels and their observational implications.

Findings

WIMP lifetime can meet cosmological bounds with certain operators

Decay channels are significantly enhanced due to Planck-scale effects

Potential for improved indirect detection signals of dark matter

Abstract

There exists a widely known conjecture that gravitational effects violate global symmetries. We study the effect of global-symmetry violating higher-dimension operators induced by Planck-scale physics on the properties of WIMP dark matter. Using an effective description, we show that the lifetime of the WIMP dark matter candidate can satisfy cosmological bounds under reasonable assumptions regarding the strength of the dimension-five operators. On the other hand, the indirect WIMP dark matter detection signal is significantly enhanced due to new decay channels.