Abstract
We study the phenomenology of superheavy decaying dark matter with mass around 1010 GeV which can arise in the low-energy limit of string compactifications. Generic features of string theory setups (such as high scale supersymmetry breaking and epochs of early matter domination driven by string moduli) can accommodate superheavy dark matter with the correct relic abundance. In addition, stringy instantons induce tiny R-parity violating couplings which make dark matter unstable with a lifetime well above the age of the Universe. Adopting a model-independent approach, we compute the flux and spectrum of high-energy gamma rays and neutrinos from three-body decays of superheavy dark matter and constrain its mass-lifetime plane with current observations and future experiments. We show that these bounds have only a mild dependence on the exact nature of neutralino dark matter and its decay channels. Applying these constraints to an explicit string model sets an upper bound of \( \mathcal{O} \)(0.1) on the string coupling, ensuring that the effective field theory is in the perturbative regime.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Nicolas Rodd for discussions on the energy spectra and Gwenhaël De Wasseige for discussions about neutrino searches. Rouzbeh Allahverdi wishes to thank the Department of Theoretical Physics at CERN for their kind hospitality while this work was being completed. The work of Rouzbeh Allahverdi is supported in part by NSF Grant No. PHY-2210367. Fabio Maltoni and Chiara Arina acknowledge the support by the F.R.S.-FNRS under the “Excellence of Science” EOS be.h project no. 30820817. The work of Marco Chianese is supported by the research grant number 2022E2J4RK “PANTHEON: Perspectives in Astroparticle and Neutrino THEory with Old and New messengers” under the program PRIN 2022 funded by the Italian Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR) and by the research project TAsP (Theoretical Astroparticle Physics) funded by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). Jacek K. Osiński is supported by the grant “AstroCeNT: Particle Astrophysics Science and Technology Centre” carried out within the International Research Agendas programme of the Foundation for Polish Science financed by the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund. The work of Michele Cicoli contributes to the COST Action COSMIC WISPers CA21106, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)”.
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Allahverdi, R., Arina, C., Chianese, M. et al. Phenomenology of superheavy decaying dark matter from string theory. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 192 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2024)192
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2024)192