Reviewing the prospect of fermion triplets as dark matter and source of baryon asymmetry in non-standard cosmology

Abstract

Indirect searches of Dark Matter (DM), in conjugation with `missing track searches' at the collider seem to confine SU(2)$_L$ fermion triplet DM (FTDM) mass within a narrow range around 1 TeV. The canonical picture of the pure FTDM is in tension since it is under-abundant for the said mass range. Several preceding studies have reported that an extra species ($\phi$), redshifts faster than the radiation ($\sim a^{-(4+n)}$ where $n>0$), leads to a faster expanding early Universe by dominating in the energy density with an enhanced Hubble parameter. This has the potential to revive the under-abundant FTDM ($\mathbb{Z}_2$ odd, lightest generation) by causing freeze-out earlier without modifying the interaction strength between DM and thermal bath. On the other hand, although the CP asymmetry produced due to the decay of $\mathbb{Z}_2$ even heavier generations of the triplet remains unaffected, its evolution is greatly affected by the non-standard cosmology. It has been observed through numerical estimations that the minimum mass of the triplet, required to produce sufficient baryon asymmetry of the Universe (BAU), can be lowered up to two orders (compared to the standard cosmology) in this fast expansion scenario. The non-standard parameters $n$ and $T_r$ (a reference temperature below which radiation dominance prevails), which simultaneously control DM abundance as well as the frozen value of BAU, are tightly constrained from the observed experimental values. We have found that $n$ is strictly bounded within the interval $0.4\lesssim n \lesssim 1.8$ where the upper bound is imposed by the BAU constraint whereas the lower bound arises to satisfy the correct DM abundance. It has been noticed that the restriction on $T_r$ is not so stringent as it can vary from sub-GeV to a few tens of GeV.