Minimal asymmetric dark matter

In the early Universe, any particle carrying a conserved quantum number and in chemical equilibrium with the thermal bath will unavoidably inherit a particle–antiparticle asymmetry. A new particle of this type, if stable, would represent a candidate for asymmetric dark matter (DM) with an asymmetry directly related to the baryon asymmetry. We study this possibility for a minimal DM sector constituted by just one (generic) SU(2)LSU(2)L multiplet χ carrying hypercharge, assuming that at temperatures above the electroweak phase transition an effective operator enforces chemical equilibrium between χ   and the Higgs boson. We argue that limits from DM direct detection searches severely constrain this scenario, leaving as the only possibilities scalar or fermion multiplets with hypercharge y=1y=1, preferentially quintuplets or larger SU(2)SU(2) representations, and with a mass in the few TeV range.