Asymmetric dark matter from a GeV hidden sector

Abstract

Asymmetric dark matter (ADM) models relate the dark matter (DM) density to the baryon asymmetry, so that a natural mass scale for ADM is around a few GeV. In existing models of ADM, this mass scale is unexplained; here we generate this GeV scale for DM) from the weak scale via gauge kinetic mixing with a new Abelian dark force. In addition, this dark sector provides an efficient mechanism for suppressing the symmetric abundance of DM through annihilations to the dark photon. We augment this sector with a higher dimensional operator responsible for communicating the baryon asymmetry to the dark sector. Our framework also provides a DM candidate for gauge mediation models. It results in a direct detection cross section of interest for current experiments: σ_p ≲ 10^(−41) cm^2 for DM masses in the range 1–15 GeV.

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