Impact of first-order phase transitions on dark matter production in the scotogenic model

Understand

In this work, we investigate the effects of first-order phase transitions on the singlet fermionic dark matter in the scotogenic model.

• It is known that this dark matter candidate tends to conflict with the relevant constraints such as the neutrino oscillation data and charged lepton flavor violating processes if its thermal production mechanism is assumed.
• We find that the dark matter production mechanisms are modified by first-order phase transitions at some specific parameter regions, where the phase transitions can be one-step or two-step depending on the parameters.
• If the phase transition is one-step, a sufficiently low nucleation temperature is required to reproduce the observed relic abundance of dark matter.