Person:

Roxlo, Thomas

We survey operators that can lead to a keV photon line from dark matter decay or annihilation. We are motivated in part by recent claims of an unexplained 3.5 keV line in galaxy clusters and in Andromeda, but our results could apply to any hypothetical line observed in this energy range. We find that given the amount of flux that is observable, explanations in terms of decay are more plausible than annihilation, at least if the annihilation is directly to Standard Model states rather than intermediate particles. The decay case can be explained by a scalar or pseudoscalar field coupling to photons suppressed by a scale not far below the reduced Planck mass, which can be taken as a tantalizing hint of high-scale physics. The scalar case is particularly interesting from the effective field theory viewpoint, and we discuss it at some length. Because of a quartically divergent mass correction, naturalness strongly suggests the theory should be cut off at or below the 1000 TeV scale. The most plausible such natural UV completion would involve supersymmetry. These bottom-up arguments reproduce expectations from top-down considerations of the physics of moduli. A keV line could also arise from the decay of a sterile neutrino, in which case a renormalizable UV completion exists and no direct inference about high-scale physics is possible

Dark matter may be coupled to dark radiation: light degrees of freedom that mediate forces between dark sector particles. Cosmological constraints favor dark radiation that is colder than Standard Model radiation. In models with fixed couplings between dark matter and the Standard Model, these constraints can be difficult to satisfy if thermal equilibrium is assumed in the early universe. We construct a model of asymmetric reheating of the visible and dark sectors from late decays of a long-lived particle (for instance, a modulus). We show, as a proof of principle, that such a model can populate a sufficiently cold dark sector while also generating baryon and dark matter asymmetries through the out-of-equilibrium decay. We frame much of our discussion in terms of the scenario of dissipative dark matter, as in the Double-Disk Dark Matter scenario. However, our results may also be of interest for other scenarios like the Twin Higgs model that are in danger of overproducing dark radiation due to nonnegligible dark-visible couplings.