Split SIMPs with Decays

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimal SIMP dark matter model with a dark QCD sector, exploring mass splittings, stability, and decay of dark mesons, and demonstrates its viability against cosmological and experimental constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SIMP cosmology with large mass splittings and long-lived unstable mesons, and discusses an ultraviolet completion within neutral naturalness.

Findings

SIMP mechanism effectively sets dark matter relic density with mass splittings.

Unstable dark mesons can decay without conflicting with CMB constraints.

The model's phenomenology is compatible with cosmological and terrestrial probes.

Abstract

We discuss a minimal realization of the strongly interacting massive particle (SIMP) framework. The model includes a dark copy of QCD with three colors and three light flavors. A massive dark photon, kinetically mixed with the Standard Model hypercharge, maintains kinetic equilibrium between the dark and visible sectors. One of the dark mesons is necessarily unstable but long-lived, with potential impact on CMB observables. We show that an approximate "isospin" symmetry acting on the down-type quarks is an essential ingredient of the model. This symmetry stabilizes the dark matter and allows to split sufficiently the masses of the other states to suppress strongly their relic abundances. We discuss for the first time the SIMP cosmology with sizable mass splittings between all meson multiplets. We demonstrate that the SIMP mechanism remains efficient in setting the dark matter relic density, while CMB constraints on unstable relics can be robustly avoided. We also consider the phenomenological consequences of isospin breaking, including dark matter decay. Cosmological, astrophysical, and terrestrial probes are combined into a global picture of the parameter space. In addition, we outline an ultraviolet completion in the context of neutral naturalness, where confinement at the GeV scale is generic. We emphasize the general applicability of several novel features of the SIMP mechanism that we discuss here.