Planck-scale effects on WIMP dark matter

Understand

There exists a widely known conjecture that gravitational effects violate global symmetries.

• We study the effect of global-symmetry violating higher-dimension operators induced by Planck-scale physics on the properties of WIMP dark matter.
• Using an effective description, we show that the lifetime of the WIMP dark matter candidate can satisfy cosmological bounds under reasonable assumptions regarding the strength of the dimension-five operators.
• On the other hand, the indirect WIMP dark matter detection signal is significantly enhanced due to new decay channels.