Thermal abundance of non-relativistic relics with Sommerfeld enhancement

Abstract

We propose an analytic treatment for computing the relic abundances of non-relativistic particles whose annihilation rate at chemical decoupling is increased by Sommerfeld enhancement. We find approximate rational functions that closely fit the thermal average of Sommerfeld-enhanced cross sections in the massless limit of force carriers for s- and p-wave annihilations. We demonstrate that, with the approximate thermally-averaged cross sections implemented, the standard analytic method for the final relic abundances provides accuracy to within 1% even for the case of Sommerfeld enhancement.

Comments: 12 pages, 3 figures; discussions and references added