Glueballs in a Thermal Squeezeout Model

TL;DR

This paper explores how a first order confinement phase transition in a confining dark sector with a Z' portal can produce long-lived dark glueballs that dilute dark matter, allowing for very heavy dark matter masses up to 10^6 TeV.

Contribution

It introduces a novel phenomenological model where dark glueballs influence relic dark matter abundance, expanding the viable parameter space for heavy dark matter.

Findings

Dark glueballs are long-lived and dilute dark matter after decay.

Correct relic abundance achieved for dark matter masses up to 10^6 TeV.

Some parameter space already constrained, but much remains testable.

Abstract

It has been shown that a first order confinement phase transition can drastically change the relic dark matter abundance in confining dark sectors with only heavy dark quarks. We study the phenomenology of one such model with a Z' portal to Standard Model. We find that dark glueballs are long-lived in this setup and dilute the dark matter abundance after their decay to Standard Model. With this effect, the correct relic abundance is obtained with dark matter masses up to $\mathcal{O}(10^6)$~TeV. We find that while a part of the parameter space is already ruled out by direct detection and collider searches, there is still a broad space of viable scenarios that can be probed by future experiments.