Dark-Matter Decay as a Complementary Probe of Multicomponent Dark Sectors

Keith R. Dienes, Jason Kumar, Brooks Thomas, and David Yaylali

Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 051301 – Published 2 February 2015

Abstract

In single-component theories of dark matter, the $2 \to 2$ amplitudes for dark-matter production, annihilation, and scattering can be related to each other through various crossing symmetries. The detection techniques based on these processes are thus complementary. However, multicomponent theories exhibit an additional direction for dark-matter complementarity: the possibility of dark-matter decay from heavier to lighter components. We discuss how this new detection channel may be correlated with the others, and demonstrate that the enhanced complementarity which emerges can be an important ingredient in probing and constraining the parameter spaces of such models.

Received 18 July 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.051301

Authors & Affiliations

Keith R. Dienes^1,2, Jason Kumar³, Brooks Thomas⁴, and David Yaylali³

¹Department of Physics, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA
²Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742 USA
³Department of Physics, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822 USA
⁴Department of Physics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6 Canada