The price for monopole dark matter

Abstract

We construct an explicit model where dark matter consists of 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles. The dark sector is in thermal contact with the Standard Model, and dark monopoles are created by a thermal phase transition in the early Universe. Generically, the abundance of monopoles is negligible with respect to that of stable dark elementary particles. We show how to avoid this by taking the lightest stable particle, a dark fermion, sufficiently light for its abundance to be suppressed, yet heavy enough to satisfy constraints on dark radiation. In this specific window of parameters, dark matter is composed of monopoles with a mass of about $10^8$ GeV or larger, depending on the nature of the phase transition. This candidate lies beyond the reach of present, conventional dark-matter detection experiments. However, the model necessarily predicts dark radiation, with $\Delta N_{\rm eff}$ close to present-day bounds. In addition, if the dark phase transition is strongly first order, we find that the corresponding gravitational wave spectrum lies close to the region probed by future interferometers.