Models of Accidental Dark Matter with a Fundamental Scalar

Abstract

We consider models of accidental dark matter, namely models in which the dark matter is a composite state that is stable thanks to an accidental symmetry of the theory. The fundamental constituents are vectorlike fermions, taken to be fragments of representations of the grand unifying gauge group $SU(5)$, as well as a scalar singlet. All the new fields are charged under a new confining gauge group, which we take to be $SU(N)$, leading to models with complex dark matter. We analyse the models in the context of $SU(5)$ grand unification with a non-standard approach recently proposed in the literature. The advantage of including the scalar mainly resides in the fact that it allows several undesired accidental symmetries to be broken, leading to a larger set of viable models with respect to previous literature, in which only fermions (or only scalars) were considered. Moreover these models present distinct novelties, namely dark states with non-zero baryon and lepton number and the existence of composite hybrid states of fermions and scalars. We identify phenomena that are specific to the inclusion of the scalar and discuss possibilities to test this setup.