Sunday, May 27, 2012

0712.0007 (Yonatan Kahn et al.)

Enhanced Rare Pion Decays from a Model of MeV Dark Matter    [PDF]

Yonatan Kahn, Michael Schmitt, Tim Tait
A model has been proposed in which neutral scalar particles chi, of mass 1-10 MeV, annihilate through the exchange of a light vector boson U, of mass 10-100 MeV, to produce the 511 keV line observed emanating from the center of the galaxy. The chi interacts weakly with normal matter and is a viable dark matter candidate. If the U-boson couples to quarks as well as to electrons, it could enhance the branching ratio for the rare decay pi0 -> e+e-. A recent measurement by the KTeV Collaboration lies three standard deviations above a prediction by Dorokhov and Ivanov, and we relate this excess to the couplings of the U-boson. The values are consistent with other constraints and considerations. We make some comments on possible improvements in the data.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.0007

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