Early kinetic decoupling and a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone dark matter model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how early kinetic decoupling affects the relic abundance of pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone dark matter, revealing underestimated couplings and implications for collider detection in the Higgs resonance region.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of early kinetic decoupling in pNG dark matter models, highlighting its impact on relic abundance calculations and collider phenomenology.

Findings

Kinetic decoupling causes a temperature difference affecting DM relic density.

The DM-Higgs coupling is underestimated in previous literature.

Enhanced coupling increases Higgs invisible decay rates, aiding collider detection.

Abstract

We study the early kinetic decoupling effect in a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone (pNG) dark matter (DM) model. The pNG DM scattering processes with particles in the thermal bath in the early Universe are suppressed by the small momentum transfer. As a result, kinetic equilibrium is not maintained, and the temperature of DM is different from the temperature of the thermal bath at the freeze-out era. This temperature difference affects the thermal relic abundance of DM. We investigate the early kinetic decoupling in the Higgs resonance region, 50 GeV $\lesssim m_\chi \lesssim m_h/2$, where $m_\chi$ is the mass of the DM, and $m_h/2 \simeq$ 62.5 GeV. We find that the DM-Higgs coupling determined to obtain the measured value of the DM energy density is underestimated in the literature. The enhancement in the coupling leads larger value of the Higgs invisible decay rate. It enlarges the capability to discover the DM signals from the decay of the Higgs bosons at collider experiments.