Efficient coannihilation process through strong Higgs self-coupling in LKP dark matter annihilation

We point out that the lightest Kaluza-Klein particle (LKP) dark matter in universal extra dimension (UED) models efficiently annihilates through the coannihilation process including the first KK Higgs bosons when the Higgs mass is slightly heavy as 200-230 GeV, which gives the large Higgs self-coupling. The large self-coupling naturally leads the mass degeneracy between the LKP and the first KK Higgs bosons and large annihilation cross sections of the KK Higgs bosons. These are essential for the enhancement of the annihilation of the LKP dark matter, which allows large compactification scale ∼1 TeV to be consistent with cosmological observations for the relic abundance of dark matter. We found that the thermal relic abundance of the LKP dark matter could be reconciled with the stringent constraint of electroweak precision measurements in the minimal UED model.