Effective Theory for Electroweak Doublet Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper develops an effective field theory model of electroweak doublet fermions as dark matter candidates, analyzing collider, cosmological, and astrophysical constraints, and highlighting the importance of magnetic dipole interactions for detectability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel effective theory framework for electroweak doublet dark matter, including both renormalizable and non-renormalizable operators, and explores its phenomenological implications.

Findings

Electroweak-scale WIMP dark matter is viable with large magnetic dipole moments.

Collider and astrophysical data constrain the model parameters significantly.

Magnetic dipole interactions are crucial for the detectability of the dark matter candidate.

Abstract

We perform a detailed study of an effective field theory which includes the Standard Model particle content extended by a pair of Weyl fermionic SU(2)-doublets with opposite hypercharges. A discrete symmetry guarantees that a linear combination of the doublet components is stable and can act as a candidate particle for Dark Matter. The dark sector fermions interact with the Higgs and gauge bosons through renormalizable $d=4$ operators, and non-renormalizable $d=5$ operators that appear after integrating out extra degrees of freedom above the TeV scale. We study collider, cosmological and astrophysical probes for this effective theory of Dark Matter. We find that a WIMP with a mass nearby to the electroweak scale, and thus observable at LHC, is consistent with collider and astrophysical data only when fairly large magnetic dipole moment transition operators with the gauge bosons exist, together with moderate Yukawa interactions.