Quirks Live in Cool Universes
Pouya Asadi, Graham D. Kribs, Markus A. Luty

TL;DR
Cosmological observations impose strong bounds on the reheat temperature in minimal quirk models, linking collider signals with early universe constraints and dark matter implications.
Contribution
This work provides the first comprehensive cosmological bounds on reheat temperature in minimal quirk models, highlighting their impact on baryogenesis and dark matter.
Findings
Reheat temperature constrained to below ~100 GeV in relevant parameter space.
Glueball relic abundance affects BBN, CMB, and dark matter observations.
Bounds are robust across model variations and can imply dark glueballs as dark matter.
Abstract
We demonstrate that cosmological observations place strong bounds on the reheat temperature of the Standard Model (SM) in minimal models of `quirks' -- heavy fermions transforming under the SM gauge group together with a new non-Abelian gauge interaction with a confinement scale far below the mass of the fermions. These models have unique collider signals associated with the confining flux strings, which cannot break due to the large mass of the quirks. Our work shows that in these models GeV for the entire `quirky' parameter space where the effects of the flux string are important. These bounds are in tension with most models of baryogenesis, showing that the discovery of quirks at colliders can have far-reaching implications for cosmology. The bounds arise because the irreducible relic abundance of glueballs from UV freeze-in,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena · Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies · Particle Detector Development and Performance
