Heidelberg 2022 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 54: Invited Topical Talks 3

T 54.4: Invited Topical Talk

Wednesday, March 23, 2022, 12:15–12:40, T-H15

Dark matter from spin-2 mediators — •Stefan Vogl — University of Freiburg

Dark matter interacting with massive spin-2 mediators is an intriguing possibility. However, due to the high energy behavior of longitudinal modes of spin-2 particles, the rate of DM annihilation into the mediators exhibits a tremendous growth as soon the channel is kinematically open. To have a consistent effective theory for the spin-2 particle, we analyze an extra-dimensional model such that the mediator(s) are the Kaluza-Klein (KK) modes of the 5D graviton. We find that including the full KK-tower in the computation reduces the annihilation rate by an order of magnitude or more. This casts some doubt on the universal applicability of previous studies with spin-2 mediators within an EFT framework and indicates that a careful consideration of UV physics is required to accurately capture the phenomenology.