2016/12/31 by Ujjal Kumar Dey, Tarak Nath Maity, Tirtha Sankar Ray · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Annihilation #Astrophysics #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark fluid #Dark matter #Light dark matter #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Scalar (mathematics) #Scalar field dark matter #Warm dark matter #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2017/03/045
published as JCAP03(2017)045 · 16 pages, 10 figures; minor changes in the text, typos fixed, added references; matches published version
openalex publication_date 2017/03/23 · arxiv created 2017/03/24 · arxiv updated 2017/03/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In this paper we investigate light dark matter scenarios where annihilation to Standard Model particles at tree-level is kinematically forbidden. In such cases annihilation can be aided by massive Standard Model-like species, called assisters , in the initial state that enhances the available phase space opening up novel tree-level processes. We investigate the feasibility of such non-standard assisted annihilation processes to reproduce the observed relic density of dark matter. We present a simple scalar dark matter-scalar assister model where this is realised. We find that if the dark matter and assister are relatively degenerate the required relic density can be achieved for a keV-MeV scale dark matter. We briefly discuss the cosmological constraints on such dark matter scenarios.