Skew-Flavored Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flavor-structured dark matter model where interactions are skewed in flavor space, respecting Minimal Flavor Violation, and explores its phenomenology, including relic abundance, detection constraints, and collider signatures.

Contribution

It proposes a novel flavor structure in dark matter interactions that avoids flavor constraints and analyzes its implications for relic density and collider phenomenology.

Findings

Dark matter can be a thermal relic in this framework.

Model remains consistent with direct and indirect detection constraints.

Collider signatures include distinctive multi-lepton events with flavor patterns.

Abstract

We explore a novel flavor structure in the interactions of dark matter with the Standard Model. We consider theories in which both the dark matter candidate, and the particles that mediate its interactions with the Standard Model fields, carry flavor quantum numbers. The interactions are skewed in flavor space, so that a dark matter particle does not directly couple to the Standard Model matter fields of the same flavor, but only to the other two flavors. This framework respects Minimal Flavor Violation, and is therefore naturally consistent with flavor constraints. We study the phenomenology of a benchmark model in which dark matter couples to right-handed charged leptons. In large regions of parameter space the dark matter can emerge as a thermal relic, while remaining consistent with the constraints from direct and indirect detection. The collider signatures of this scenario include events with multiple leptons and missing energy. These events exhibit a characteristic flavor pattern that may allow this class of models to be distinguished from other theories of dark matter.