Nucleon - Light Dark Matter Annihilation through Baryon Number Violation

Understand

Dark matter that participates in baryon-number violating interactions can annihilate with baryons if the dark matter particle is not protected under discrete symmetries.

• In this paper we investigate the dark matter - baryon annihilation in color-triplet extensions of the Standard Model, in which a fermionic dark matter can be kinematically stable within a small mass range near the proton mass.
• We demonstrate that the DM's annihilation with nucleons can be probed to stringent limits at large-volume water Cherenkov detectors like the Super-Kamionkonde experiment, with the mediator scale $m_\Phi$ constrained up to $10^{7}$ GeV.
• In case of a Majorana light dark matter, this constraint is weaker yet close in magnitude to that from neutron-antineutron oscillation.