Higgs Portal Majorana Fermionic Dark Matter with the Freeze-in Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper investigates a minimal Higgs portal Majorana fermionic dark matter model produced via freeze-in, analyzing relic abundance, parameter constraints, and direct detection prospects.

Contribution

It introduces a freeze-in production mechanism for Majorana fermionic dark matter via a higher-dimensional Higgs portal interaction, providing numerical relic abundance analysis and experimental constraints.

Findings

Relic abundance contours depend on DM mass, reheating temperature, and cutoff scale.

Upper bounds on DM mass and cutoff scale are derived from relic abundance constraints.

Predicted direct detection cross sections are below current experimental limits.

Abstract

We consider a minimal model of fermionic dark matter, in which the Majorana fermion dark matter (DM) $\chi$ couples with the Standard Model (SM) Higgs field $H$ through a higher-dimensional term $-{\cal L}\supset H^\dagger H \bar{\chi}\chi/\Lambda$, where $\Lambda$ is the cutoff scale. We assume that $\Lambda$ is sufficiently large that DM particles are not in thermal equilibrium with the SM Particles throughout the history of the Universe. Hence, DM particles are produced only by the freeze-in mechanism. Through a numerical analysis of the freeze-in mechanism, we show contour plots of the DM relic abundance for various values of the DM mass, reheating temperature and the cutoff scale. We obtain an upper bound of the DM mass and cutoff scale from contour plots on ($m_\chi, \Lambda$)-plane. We also consider the direct DM detection for the parameter regions where the DM relic abundance is consistent with the experimental values. We find that the spin-independent cross section for the elastic scattering with a nucleon is below the current experimental upper bound.