Lepton dark matter portal in the inert Zee model

TL;DR

This paper explores a modified inert Zee model that introduces a lepton portal for dark matter, analyzing its implications for dark matter detection and identifying parameter regions compatible with current and future experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a lepton portal in the inert Zee model, expanding dark matter annihilation channels and analyzing its phenomenology in the low mass regime.

Findings

Lepton portal significantly affects dark matter annihilation.

Parameter space for dark matter mass below 70 GeV is viable.

Future experiments can probe large parts of the model's parameter space.

Abstract

The inert Zee model is an extension of the Zee model for neutrino masses. This new model explains the dark matter relic abundance, generates a one-loop neutrino masses and forbids tree-level Higgs-mediated flavor changing neutral currents. Although the dark matter phenomenology of the model is similar to that of the inert doublet model, the presence of new vector-like fermions opens the lepton portal as a new dark matter annihilation channel. We study the impact of such a new portal in the low mass regime and show the parameter space allowed by direct and indirect searches of dark matter. Remarkably, we show that the region for $m_{H^0} \lesssim$ 70 GeV is recovered for $\lambda_L \lesssim 10^{-3}$. We also show that future experiments like LZ and DARWIN could test a large region of the parameter space of the model.