Soft Collinear Effective Theory for Heavy WIMP Annihilation

Understand

In a large class of models for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the WIMP mass $M$ lies far above the weak scale $m_W$.

• This work identifies universal Sudakov-type logarithms $\sim \alpha \log^2 (2\,M/m_W)$ that spoil the naive convergence of perturbation theory for annihilation processes.
• An effective field theory (EFT) framework is presented, allowing the systematic resummation of these logarithms.
• Another impact of the large separation of scales is that a long-distance wave-function distortion from electroweak boson exchange leads to observable modifications of the cross section.