Abstract
We consider models of decaying spin-1 dark matter whose dominant coupling to the standard model sector is through a dark-Higgs Yukawa portal connecting a TeV-scale vector-like lepton to the standard model (right-handed) electron. Below the electron-positron threshold, dark matter has very slow, loop-suppressed decays to photons and (electron) neutrinos, and is stable on cosmological time-scale for sufficiently small gauge coupling values. Its relic abundance is set by in-equilibrium dark lepton decays, through the freeze-in mechanism. We show that this model accommodates the observed dark matter abundance for natural values of its parameters and a dark matter mass in the ∼ 5 keV to 1 MeV range, while evading constraints from direct detection, indirect detection, stellar cooling and cosmology. We also consider the possibility of a nonzero gauge kinetic mixing with the standard model hypercharge field, which is found to yield a mild impact on the model’s phenomenology.
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Delaunay, C., Ma, T. & Soreq, Y. Stealth decaying spin-1 dark matter. J. High Energ. Phys. 2021, 10 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2021)010
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2021)010