Invited Seminar - Chiara Arina - Asymmetric Cold Dark Matter from Leptogenesis

by Chiara Arina (UVL)

Wednesday 28 Nov 2012, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Brussels

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

The nature of dark matter particles and the mechanism that provides their measured relic abundance are currently unknown. In this talk we present a simple Standard Model extension that consists of a fourth generation vector-like fermion doublet. The neutral and lightest component, a 4th generation neutrino, is the dark matter candidate and has a charge asymmetry in the dark sector, which is generated by the same mechanism that provides the baryon asymmetry, namely leptogenesis induced by decays of scalar triplets. We discuss the model parameter space that satisfies simultaneously the cosmological constraints on visible and dark matter abundance and on the baryon asymmetry. We then present the properties that make an asymmetric fourth generation neutrino a viable dark matter candidate, with particular attention to its signatures at direct dark matter searches and to the complementarity role of LHC searches for its discovery or exclusion.