Strongly-interacting massive particle and dark photon in the era of intensity frontier

Abstract

A strongly interacting massive particle (SIMP) is an interesting candidate for dark matter (DM) because its self-interaction cross section can be naturally strong enough to address the astrophysical problem of small-scale structure formation. A simple model was proposed by assuming a monopole condensation, where composite SIMP comes from a "strongly interacting" U(1)${}_{\mathrm{d}}$ gauge theory. In the original model, the DM relic abundance is determined by the $3\to 2$ annihilation process via the Wess-Zumino-Witten term. In this letter, we discuss that the DM relic abundance is naturally determined also by a semi-annihilation process via a kinetic mixing between the hypercharge gauge boson and the dark U(1)${}_{\mathrm{d}}$ gauge boson (dark photon). The dark photon can be discovered by LDMX-style missing momentum experiments in the near future.

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures; v2: figure updated, minor comments added