Bound states of WIMP dark matter in Higgs-portal models. Part I. Cross-sections and transition rates

We investigate the role of the Higgs doublet in the thermal decoupling of multi-TeV dark matter coupled to the Weak interactions of the Standard Model and the Higgs. The Higgs doublet can mediate a long-range force that affects the annihilation processes and binds dark matter into bound states. More importantly, the emission of a Higgs doublet by a pair of dark matter particles can give rise to extremely rapid monopole bound-state formation processes and bound-to-bound transitions. We compute these effects in the unbroken electroweak phase. To this end, we consider the simplest renormalisable fermionic model, consisting of a singlet and a doublet under SUL(2) that are stabilised by a ℤ2 symmetry, in the regime where the two multiplets coannihilate. In a companion paper, we use the results to show that the formation of metastable bound states via Higgs-doublet emission and their decay decrease the relic density very significantly.

Parafermionization, bosonization, and critical parafermionic theories

We formulate a ℤk-parafermionization/bosonization scheme for one-dimensional lattice models and field theories on a torus, starting from a generalized Jordan-Wigner transformation on a lattice, which extends the Majorana-Ising duality atk= 2. The ℤk-parafermionization enables us to investigate the critical theories of parafermionic chains whose fundamental degrees of freedom are parafermionic, and we find that their criticality cannot be described by any existing conformal field theory. The modular transformations of these parafermionic low-energy critical theories as general consistency conditions are found to be unconventional in that their partition functions on a torus transform differently from any conformal field theory whenk >2. Explicit forms of partition functions are obtained by the developed parafermionization for a large class of critical ℤk-parafermionic chains, whose operator contents are intrinsically distinct from any bosonic or fermionic model in terms of conformal spins and statistics. We also use the parafermionization to exhaust all the ℤk-parafermionic minimal models, complementing earlier works on fermionic cases.

Integrating out new fermions at one loop

We present the fermionic universal one-loop effective action obtained by integrating out heavy vector-like fermions at one loop using functional techniques. Even though previous approaches are able to handle integrating out heavy fermions with non-chiral interactions, i.e. vanishing γ5 interaction terms, the computations proceed in a tedious manner that obscures a physical interpretation. We show how directly tackling the fermionic functional determinant not only allows for a much simpler and transparent computation, but is also able to account for chiral interaction terms in a simple, algorithmic way. Finally, we apply the obtained results to integrate out at one loop the vector-like fermions appearing in a toy model and in a fermionic model that exhibits strong cosmological phase transitions.

Subsystem Rényi entropy of thermal ensembles for SYK-like models

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model is an NN-modes fermionic model with infinite range random interactions. In this work, we study the thermal Rényi entropy for a subsystem of the SYK model using the path-integral formalism in the large-NN limit. The results are consistent with exact diagonalization and can be well approximated by thermal entropy with an effective temperature when subsystem size M\leq N/2M≤N/2. We also consider generalizations of the SYK model with quadratic random hopping term or U(1)U(1) charge conservation.