https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-7060-5
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Neutrino portals to dark matter
1
Departamento de Física Teórica and Instituto de Física Teórica, IFT-UAM/CSIC, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Cantoblanco, 28049, Madrid, Spain
2
Department of Physics, School of Engineering Sciences, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, AlbaNova University Center, Roslagstullsbacken 21, 106 91, Stockholm, Sweden
3
Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Department of Physics, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
* e-mail: arsenii.titov@durham.ac.uk
Received:
28
March
2019
Accepted:
20
June
2019
Published online:
2
July
2019
We explore the possibility that dark matter interactions with Standard Model particles are dominated by interactions with neutrinos. We examine whether it is possible to construct such a scenario in a gauge invariant manner. We first study the coupling of dark matter to the full lepton doublet and confirm that this generally leads to the dark matter phenomenology being dominated by interactions with charged leptons. We then explore two different implementations of the neutrino portal in which neutrinos mix with a Standard Model singlet fermion that interacts directly with dark matter through either a scalar or vector mediator. In the latter cases we find that the neutrino interactions can dominate the dark matter phenomenology. Present neutrino detectors can probe dark matter annihilations into neutrinos and already set the strongest constraints on these realisations. Future experiments such as Hyper-Kamiokande, MEMPHYS, DUNE, or DARWIN could allow to probe dark matter-neutrino cross sections down to the value required to obtain the correct thermal relic abundance.
© The Author(s), 2019
