Physics Theory Seminar with Tao Xu on Recycled Dark Matter

Dark matter candidates whose mass is much heavier than conventional Weakly Interacting Massive Particles have received substantial interest recently, in terms of their production mechanisms and searches in direct and indirect detection experiments. The mass of thermal dark matter particles is constrained model-independently by the perturbative unitarity bound, which limits it to O(100) TeV. In this talk, I will introduce a novel production mechanism that we dub “recycling”. The mechanism involves the formation of black holes facilitated by dark matter interactions during a high scale phase transition, followed by the subsequent evaporation of these black holes, which leads to the production of dark matter relic abundance. I will show that recycling is particularly suited for producing ultraheavy dark matter.

This lecture was made possible by the William C. Ferguson Fund.