Unified dark matter with intermediate symmetry breaking scales

TL;DR

This paper proposes a unified model of dark and visible matter using asymmetric symmetry breaking in SO(10) GUTs, explaining the similar baryon densities and small mass differences through different high-energy symmetry breaking paths.

Contribution

It introduces a novel class of models unifying dark and visible sectors with distinct intermediate symmetry breaking, leading to different confinement scales.

Findings

Models produce similar baryon densities in dark and visible sectors.

Different symmetry breaking paths lead to varied confinement scales.

The approach explains small mass differences between baryons in both sectors.

Abstract

Asymmetric symmetry breaking models dynamically break the G X G gauge symmetries of mirror models to distinct subgroups in the two sectors. The coincidental abundances of visible and dark matter, $\Omega_{DM} \simeq 5\Omega_{VM}$, motivates asymmetric dark matter theories where similar number densities of baryons in each sector are explained by their connected origins. However the question of why the baryons of two sectors should have similar mass remains. In this work we develop an alternative class of asymmetric symmetry breaking models which unify the dark and visible sectors while generating a small difference in the mass scale of the baryons of each sector. By examining the different paths that the SO(10) GUT group can take in breaking to gauge symmetries containing SU(3) we can adapt the mechanism of asymmetric symmetry breaking to demonstrate models in which originally unified visible and dark sectors have isomorphic color gauge groups at low energy yet pass through different intermediate gauge groups at high energy. Through this, slight differences in the running coupling evolutions and thus the confinement scales of the two sectors are generated.