Abstract
We apply the operator product expansion (OPE) technique to the decay and annihilation of heavy particles in a thermal medium with temperature below the heavy particle mass, m χ. This allows us to explain two interesting observations made before: a) that the leading thermal correction to the decay width of a charged particle is the same multiplicative factor of the zero-temperature width for a two-body decay and muon decay, and b) that the leading thermal correction to fermionic dark matter annihilation arises only at order T 4/m 4 χ . The OPE further considerably simplifies the computation and factorizes it into model-independent matrix elements in the thermal background, and short-distance coefficients to be computed in zero-temperature field theory.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
J.F. Donoghue and B.R. Holstein, Renormalization and Radiative Corrections at Finite Temperature, Phys. Rev. D 28 (1983) 340 [Erratum ibid. D 29 (1984) 3004] [INSPIRE].
S. Biondini, N. Brambilla, M.A. Escobedo and A. Vairo, An effective field theory for non-relativistic Majorana neutrinos, JHEP 12 (2013) 028 [arXiv:1307.7680] [INSPIRE].
A. Czarnecki, M. Kamionkowski, S.K. Lee and K. Melnikov, Charged Particle Decay at Finite Temperature, Phys. Rev. D 85 (2012) 025018 [arXiv:1110.2171] [INSPIRE].
M. Beneke, F. Dighera and A. Hryczuk, Relic density computations at NLO: infrared finiteness and thermal correction, JHEP 10 (2014) 45 [Erratum ibid. 1607 (2016) 106] [arXiv:1409.3049] [INSPIRE].
I.I.Y. Bigi, N.G. Uraltsev and A.I. Vainshtein, Nonperturbative corrections to inclusive beauty and charm decays: QCD versus phenomenological models, Phys. Lett. B 293 (1992) 430 [Erratum ibid. B 297 (1992) 477] [hep-ph/9207214] [INSPIRE].
T. Hatsuda, Y. Koike and S.-H. Lee, Finite temperature QCD sum rules reexamined: rho, omega and A1 mesons, Nucl. Phys. B 394 (1993) 221 [INSPIRE].
S. Mallik, Operator product expansion at finite temperature, Phys. Lett. B 416 (1998) 373 [hep-ph/9710556] [INSPIRE].
S. Caron-Huot, Asymptotics of thermal spectral functions, Phys. Rev. D 79 (2009) 125009 [arXiv:0903.3958] [INSPIRE].
M. Laine and Y. Schröder, Thermal right-handed neutrino production rate in the non-relativistic regime, JHEP 02 (2012) 068 [arXiv:1112.1205] [INSPIRE].
J. Chay, H. Georgi and B. Grinstein, Lepton energy distributions in heavy meson decays from QCD, Phys. Lett. B 247 (1990) 399 [INSPIRE].
B. Blok, L. Koyrakh, M.A. Shifman and A.I. Vainshtein, Differential distributions in semileptonic decays of the heavy flavors in QCD, Phys. Rev. D 49 (1994) 3356 [Erratum ibid. D 50 (1994) 3572] [hep-ph/9307247] [INSPIRE].
A.V. Manohar and M.B. Wise, Inclusive semileptonic B and polarized Lambda(b) decays from QCD, Phys. Rev. D 49 (1994) 1310 [hep-ph/9308246] [INSPIRE].
I.I.Y. Bigi, M.A. Shifman, N.G. Uraltsev and A.I. Vainshtein, QCD predictions for lepton spectra in inclusive heavy flavor decays, Phys. Rev. Lett. 71 (1993) 496 [hep-ph/9304225] [INSPIRE].
Open Access
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
ArXiv ePrint: 1607.03910
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
About this article
Cite this article
Beneke, M., Dighera, F. & Hryczuk, A. Finite-temperature modification of heavy particle decay and dark matter annihilation. J. High Energ. Phys. 2016, 31 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2016)031
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2016)031