New Pathways to the Relic Abundance of Vector-Portal Dark Matter

by Hongwan Liu (NYU)

Monday 8 Feb 2021, 15:00 → 17:00 Europe/Berlin

zoom

The vector-portal dark sector --- composed of a dark matter particle coupled to a dark photon, which kinetically mixes with the Standard Model photon --- is an important benchmark model in dark matter phenomenology. In this talk, I will review how the freezeout of the dark matter occurs when the dark photon is slightly more massive than the dark matter particle. In this regime, the temperature evolution of the dark sector must be carefully tracked in order to obtain an accurate understanding of how freezeout proceeds. Doing so, we find several novel and distinct freezeout scenarios within the experimentally viable parameter space of this model, providing a well-motivated target for future dark matter searches.