2005/06/08 by Philip Schuster, Philip C. Schuster, Schuster, Philip C. +2
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/0506079
36 pages, 10 figures and 1 table, references fixed
openalex publication_date 2005/06/08 · arxiv created 2005/06/09 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A simple and well-motivated explanation for the origin of dark matter is that it consists of thermal relic particles that get their mass entirely through electroweak symmetry breaking. The simplest models implementing this possibility predict a dark matter candidate that consists of a mixture of two Dirac neutrinos with opposite isospin, and so has suppressed coupling to the Z. These models predict dark matter masses of mDM~45 GeV or mDM~90-95 GeV and WIMP-neutron spin-independent cross sections σWIMP-n~10-6-10-8 pb. Current direct dark matter searches are probing a portion of the parameter space of these models while future experiments sensitive to σWIMP-n~10-8 pb will probe the remainder. An enhancement of the galactic halo gamma ray and positron flux coming from annihilations of these particles is also expected across the ~1-100 GeV range. The framework further suggests an environmental explanation of the hierarchy between the weak and Planck scales and of the small value of the cosmological constant relative to the weak scale.