Final state Sommerfeld effect on dark matter relic abundance

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the Sommerfeld effect in the final state particles influences dark matter relic abundance, revealing that long-range interactions can significantly alter predictions in thermal freeze-out scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of final state Sommerfeld effect in dark matter annihilation and analyzes its impact on relic abundance, including suppression effects due to particle instability.

Findings

Final state Sommerfeld effect can significantly modify dark matter relic abundance.

Electroweak-sized interactions produce corrections beyond observational accuracy.

Instability of final state particles can suppress the Sommerfeld effect in coannihilation scenarios.

Abstract

If the annihilation products of dark matter (DM) are non-relativistic and if there is some long-range force between them, there can be Sommerfeld effect for the final state particles. We study this effect on DM relic abundance in the thermal freeze-out scenario. As a proof of concept, we consider the case of a DM pair annihilation into a final state pair, assuming that the mutual interactions between the two final state particles give rise to a Coulomb-like potential, and that the masses of the initial and final state particles are similar, so that both the initial and final state particles are non-relativistic. The size of the final state Sommerfeld (FSS) effect depends on the strength of the potential, as well as on the mass ratio of the final and initial state particles. We find that the impact of the FSS effect on DM relic abundance can be significant, and an electroweak sized long-range interaction is large enough to make a correction well beyond the observational accuracy. Another feature of the FSS effect is that it could be suppressed when its time scale is longer than the lifetime of the final state particles. As a corollary, we also study in the DM coannihilation scenario where the initial state Sommerfeld effect between two coannihilators could be reduced due to their instability, which may need to be taken into account for an accurate calculation of the DM relic abundance.