Minimal Asymmetric Dark Matter

In the early Universe, any particle carrying a conserved quantum number and in chemical equilibrium with the thermal bath will unavoidably inherit a particle-antiparticle asymmetry. A new particle of this type, if stable, would represent a candidate for asymmetric dark matter (DM) with an asymmetry directly related to the baryon asymmetry. We study this possibility for a minimal DM sector constituted by just one (generic) $SU(2)_L$ multiplet $χ$ carrying hypercharge, assuming that at temperatures above the electroweak phase transition an effective operator enforces chemical equilibrium between $χ$ and the Higgs boson. We argue that limits from DM direct detection searches severely constrain this scenario, leaving as the only possibilities scalar or fermion multiplets with hypercharge $y = 1$, preferentially quintuplets or larger $SU(2)$ representations, and with a mass in the few TeV range.

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