Cosmological signals of dark matter semi-annihilation

Abstract

The growth of primordial density fluctuations in the early Universe leads to an inhomogeneous dark matter distribution at high redshift, where semi-annihilation processes of the form $\chi\chi \rightarrow \chi^c \phi$, with $\phi$ being dark radiation, can occur with a sizable rate. Using a state-of-the-art model for the cosmological boost factor, we compute the resulting redshift-dependent flux of boosted dark matter particles generated by semi-annihilation, and we study the implications of the boosted component for structure formation and direct detection experiments. We find a model independent upper limit on the semi-annihilation cross-section from structure formation, which reads $\langle\sigma_{2\to1} v\rangle\leq4.2\times10^{-19}~\left(m_\chi/1~\rm GeV\right)~\mathrm{cm}^3/{\rm s}$. Further, we find that the cosmological contribution to the boosted dark matter flux can be comparable to the galactic one, providing an $O(1)$ enhancement to the sensitivity of dark matter searches, thus slightly enhancing the discovery potential in direct detection experiments of semi-annihilation scenarios where the dark matter interacts with the nucleus.