Super heavy thermal dark matter

Understand

We propose a mechanism of elementary thermal dark matter with mass up to $10^{14}$ GeV, within a standard cosmological history, whose relic abundance is determined solely by its interactions with the Standard Model, without violating the perturbative unitarity bound.

• The dark matter consists of many nearly degenerate particles which scatter with the Standard Model bath in a nearest-neighbor chain, and maintain chemical equilibrium with the Standard Model bath by in-equilibrium decays and inverse decays.
• The phenomenology includes super heavy elementary dark matter and heavy relics that decay at various epochs in the cosmological history, with implications for CMB, structure formation and cosmic ray experiments.