Probing superheavy dark matter with gravitational waves

Abstract

We study the superheavy dark matter (DM) scenario in an extended $B-L$ model, where one generation of right-handed neutrino ${\nu }_R$ is the DM candidate. If there is a new lighter sterile neutrino that co-annihilate with the DM candidate, then the annihilation rate is exponentially enhanced, allowing a DM mass much heavier than the Griest-Kamionkowski bound ($\sim 10^5$ GeV). We demonstrate that a DM mass $M_{{\nu }_R}\gtrsim 10^{13}$ GeV can be achieved. Although beyond the scale of any traditional DM searching strategy, this scenario is testable via gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by the cosmic strings from the $U(1{)}_{B-L}$ breaking. Quantitative calculations show that the DM mass $\mathcal{O}(10^9-10^{13}\mathrm{GeV})$ can be probed by future GW detectors.

Comments: 13 pages + references; 2 figures and 2 tables. To appear on JHEP