Nonthermal Heavy Dark Matter from a First-Order Phase Transition
arxiv(2024)
摘要
We study nonthermal production of heavy dark matter from the dynamics of the
background scalar field during a first-order phase transition, predominantly
from bubble collisions. In scenarios where bubble walls achieve runaway
behavior and get boosted to very high energies, we find that it is possible to
produce dark matter with mass several orders of magnitude above the symmetry
breaking scale or the highest temperature ever reached by the thermal plasma.
We also demonstrate that the existing formalism for calculating particle
production from bubble dynamics in a first-order phase transition is not gauge
invariant, and can lead to spurious results. While a rigorous and complete
resolution of this problem is still lacking, we provide a practical
prescription for the computation that avoids unphysical contributions and
should provide reliable order-of-magnitude estimates of this effect.
Furthermore, we point out the importance of three-body decays of the background
field excitations into scalars and gauge bosons, which provide the dominant
contributions at energy scales above the scale of symmetry breaking. Using our
improved results, we find that scalar, fermion, and vector dark matter are all
viable across a large range of mass scales, from O(10) TeV to a few orders of
magnitude below the Planck scale, and the corresponding phase transitions can
be probed with current and future gravitational wave experiments.
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