Dark Matter and Its Taste Preferences express
The cosmos is filled with invisible dark matter, which betrays itself only through gravity. Its existence was suspected by Fritz Zwicky and confirmed by Vera Rubin. But the mystery remains: what 'ingredients' is it made of and by what recipes does it mix with ordinary matter?
New work compares dark matter to a fussy chef: it can only use certain particles from the Standard Model — for example, quarks (the building blocks of protons and neutrons) or leptons (electrons and their kin). These preferences are dictated by hidden rules — symmetries that determine which particles can be mixed. Scientists tested two extreme recipes: the 'quark' and the 'lepton' one. It turned out that existing observations of particle transformations and searches with detectors already strongly narrow down the range of possible ingredients. An unexpected conclusion: if dark matter 'loves' only leptons, most modern traps simply won’t notice it — they are tuned to the quark flavor.
Now, knowing the permissible deviations from the ideal recipe, future experiments can purposefully search for traces of dark matter left over from the Big Bang. Perhaps the fussy chef will soon reveal its secret ingredient.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2601.07921v1
What flavour structure of $$t$$-channel thermal dark matter remains compatible with current flavour physics and direct detection bounds? We broadly chart the space of hypotheses using the framework of flavour symmetries and their breaking patterns. We then focus on scenarios in which the fermionic dark matter and its scalar mediator are flavour singlets, falling into the class of rank-1 flavour violation. For two representative benchmarks, quarkphilic ($$q_L$$) and leptophilic ($$e_R$$), we perform a comprehensive phenomenological analysis, fitting the relic abundance and examining the interplay among flavour observables, direct detection, and collider searches. Our results quantify the allowed deviations from flavour-symmetric limits and assess the discovery prospects in future flavour and direct detection experiments.
Fritz Zwicky noticed: there isn’t enough visible matter in galaxies to keep them from flying apart. That’s how the idea of dark matter was born.
In Blake Crouch's novel 'Dark Matter', it serves as a portal to parallel worlds — far more spectacular than lab formulas.