The price for monopole dark matter
Felix Brümmer, Giacomo Ferrante, Théodore Fischer, Michele Frigerio
hep-ph, astro-ph.CO, hep-th
Submitted: 2026-07-31
Comments: 24 + 12 pages, 9 + 5 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We construct an explicit model where dark matter consists of 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles.
Terminology
Abstract
We construct an explicit model where dark matter consists of 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles. The dark sector is in thermal contact with the Standard Model, and dark monopoles are created by a thermal phase transition in the early Universe. Generically, the abundance of monopoles is negligible with respect to that of stable dark elementary particles. We show how to avoid this by taking the lightest stable particle, a dark fermion, sufficiently light for its abundance to be suppressed, yet heavy enough to satisfy constraints on dark radiation. In this specific window of parameters, dark matter is composed of monopoles with a mass of about 10 8 GeV or larger, depending on the nature of the phase transition. This candidate lies beyond the reach of present, conventional dark-matter detection experiments. However, the model necessarily predicts dark radiation, with N eff close to present-day bounds. In addition, if the dark phase transition is strongly first order, we find that the corresponding gravitational wave spectrum lies close to the region probed by future interferometers.
Sources
- Topological Dark Matter
- No room for minimal monopole dark matter
- Dark matter in classically conformal theories: WIMP and supercooling
- Theta Dependence in the Presence of Massless Fermions
- A precision calculation of relic neutrino decoupling
- Neutrino decoupling including flavour oscillations and primordial nucleosynthesis
- Towards a precision calculation of $N_{\rm eff}$ in the Standard Model II: Neutrino decoupling in the presence of flavour oscillations and finite-temperature QED
- Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters
- The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Constraints on Extended Cosmological Models
- SPT-3G D1: CMB temperature and polarization power spectra and cosmology from 2019 and 2020 observations of the SPT-3G Main field
- Combining CMB datasets with consistent foreground modelling
- The LBT $Y_{\rm p}$ Project I: An Improved Determination of the Primordial Helium Abundance -- Project Description, Sample Selection, Observations, and Methodology
- Cosmological Parameter Estimation with a Joint-Likelihood Analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
- The LBT $Y_{\rm p}$ Project V: Cosmological Implications of a New Determination of Primordial $^4$He
- On Effective Degrees of Freedom in the Early Universe
- Universality of Phase Transition Dynamics: Topological Defects from Symmetry Breaking
- The Supercooling Window at Weak and Strong Coupling
- Cosmological phase transitions: from perturbative particle physics to gravitational waves
- Supercooling in Radiative Symmetry Breaking: Theory Extensions, Gravitational Wave Detection and Primordial Black Holes
- Gravitational waves from first order cosmological phase transitions in the Sound Shell Model
Related papers
- Classification of g-modes for neutron stars with a strong transition: Novel universal relation including slow stable hybrid stars
- Higgsino Dark Matter Interpretation of the LUX-ZEPLIN 248 keV Nuclear-Recoil Event
- A Unified Bogoliubov Approach to Primordial Gravitational Waves: From Inflation to Reheating
- Probing Memory-Burdened Primordial Black Holes with High-Energy Neutrinos
- Enhanced Dark Matter Quantum Sensing via Phase-Space Geometric Interferometry
- Axions as Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and Dark Radiation