OpenAlex ·
A Peccei-Quinn Origin for Inelastic Electroweak Dark Matter after LUX-ZEPLIN
- Published
- Source
- OpenAlex
- Published in
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- DOI
- 10.48550/arxiv.2609.02807
- Original
- Read it at the publisher
Abstract
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment has reported a nuclear recoil event reconstructed at $E_R=248\pm23_{\rm stat}\pm23_{\rm sys}{\rm\,keV}$ in a dedicated high-recoil search. We investigate an inelastic electroweak (EW) doublet interpretation in which spontaneous Peccei-Quinn (PQ) breaking leaves a residual parity that stabilizes the lighter neutral state and generates its Majorana splitting. A PQ-charged singlet fermion acquires a Majorana mass from the PQ-breaking vacuum expectation value and, once integrated out, induces the dimension-five operator that splits a vectorlike EW doublet, while a minimal KSVZ sector supplies the QCD anomaly. For $v_S=4.4\times10^{11}{\rm\,GeV}$ and $M_N\simeq50{\rm\,TeV}$, the LZ-motivated splitting requires $y\simeq0.023$. In a standard thermal history, the EW doublet is subdominant. Three kinematic benchmarks with $M_D=297.0$, $396.4$, and $549.7{\rm\,GeV}$, $δ_χ\simeq304$-$343{\rm\,keV}$, and $ξ_χ\simeq0.073$-$0.250$ each yield about one recoil event, while their accepted spectra peak below the observed recoil energy, so they are interpreted as kinematic rather than spectral best-fit points. The remaining abundance can be supplied by the QCD axion through vacuum misalignment. We recompute solar capture for the subdominant thermal WIMP component and compare the resulting annihilation signal with the IceCube $W^+W^-$ limit, finding the LZ-motivated standard-thermal branch excluded under the assumptions adopted here. The excited state has a millisecond-scale radiative lifetime and kilometer-scale decay length, leaving the LZ topology dominated by a single nuclear recoil while allowing complementary luminous signals after terrestrial upscattering.
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