Thursday, August 28, 2014

particle physics - Why is the Standard model Higgs not a candidate of dark matter (in particular, a WIMP)?


Please consider me as a naive self-learner in this field.


The Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson is electrically neutral and has a mass of around $125$ GeV (which lies in the WIMP window i.e., between 10 GeV to 1TeV). Why is then it is not a candidate of dark matter?





  1. Surely it can decay into SM fermions and gauge bosons. But are we sure that the decay modes are not kinematically forbidden or insignificant so as to explain the present relic abundance?




  2. As I said that the Higgs boson mass lies in the WIMP mass window. How is it then different from a WIMP?





Answer



Higgs would quickly decay to a mix of products, many of them electrically charged. Thus dark matter is neither Higgs nor former Higgs.


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