High Energy Physics Seminar

There exists overwhelming evidence pointing toward the existence of dark matter. Yet, its particle nature still remains a mystery. In light of this, it is important to map out all different dark sector models. A motivated class of such  models are confining dark sectors. In this talk, I present a detailed study of the confinement phase transition in a dark sector with a SU(N) gauge group and a single generation of dark heavy quark. I focus on heavy enough quarks such that their abundance freezes out before the phase transition and the phase transition is of first-order. I show that during this phase transition the quarks are trapped inside contracting pockets of the deconfined phase and are compressed enough to interact at a significant rate, giving rise to a second stage of annihilation that can dramatically change the resulting dark matter abundance. As a result, the dark matter can be heavier than the often-quoted unitarity bound of ~100 TeV.

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