SIMPly add a dark photon

TL;DR

This paper explores how adding a dark photon to SIMP dark matter models can enhance interactions, ensure thermalization, and influence structure formation, identifying viable parameter spaces with specific dark pion masses and couplings.

Contribution

It demonstrates that incorporating a dark photon can satisfy all key conditions for SIMP dark matter, expanding viable parameter space and addressing previous constraints.

Findings

Dark photon addition can enable thermalization with the SM.

Resonant enhancement allows perturbative $3\to2$ interactions.

Viable dark pion masses are in the 250-600 MeV range.

Abstract

Pions of a dark sector gauge group can be strongly interacting massive particle (SIMP) dark matter, produced by the freeze-out of $3 \to 2$ interactions, with naturally large self-interactions. We study if adding a dark photon to the set-up can do it all: i) maintain thermalization with the visible sector, ii) resonantly enhance the $3\to2$ interactions, thus allowing for a perturbative pion description, and iii) provide a velocity dependent self-interaction that can affect small scale structure formation. For $N_f=3$ this minimal setup is marginally excluded, as the required kinetic mixing is too small to maintain thermal equilibrium with the SM. Adding an extra dark quark opens up parameter space, and -- perhaps somewhat surprisingly -- we find that all bounds can be satisfied for dark pion masses $m_\pi \sim 250-600\,$MeV. Dropping the small scale structure requirement iii), a viable setup is reproduced for dark charges of $\alpha_d = 0.01-1$ and a dark pion mass $m_\pi \geq 30$ MeV. Late time annihilations are non-negligible making the SIMP dark pion a bit WIMPy.