Looking for the WIMP Next Door
Jared A. Evans, Stefania Gori, Jessie Shelton

TL;DR
This paper investigates minimal hidden sector dark matter models, especially WIMPs next door, analyzing their cosmological history, experimental signals, and how current experiments probe their parameter space.
Contribution
It introduces a minimal, predictive cosmology for hidden sector dark matter with thermal equilibrium, and maps out the experimentally accessible parameter space for WIMPs next door.
Findings
The thermalization floor for portal couplings is established as a function of equilibration temperature.
Current direct detection experiments probe the cosmological lower bound in some parameter regions.
Identifies viable parameter space for sub-GeV dark matter detection.
Abstract
We comprehensively study experimental constraints and prospects for a class of minimal hidden sector dark matter (DM) models, highlighting how the cosmological history of these models informs the experimental signals. We study simple "secluded" models, where the DM freezes out into unstable dark mediator states, and consider the minimal cosmic history of this dark sector, where coupling of the dark mediator to the SM was sufficient to keep the two sectors in thermal equilibrium at early times. In the well-motivated case where the dark mediators couple to the Standard Model (SM) via renormalizable interactions, the requirement of thermal equilibrium provides a minimal, UV-insensitive, and predictive cosmology for hidden sector dark matter. We call DM that freezes out of a dark radiation bath in thermal equilibrium with the SM a WIMP next door, and demonstrate that the parameter space for…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
