Relic density of dark matter in the inert doublet model beyond leading order: The heavy mass case

Abstract

A full renormalization of the inert doublet model is presented and exploited for a precise calculation of the relic density of dark matter (DM) at one-loop. In this first paper, we study the case of a DM candidate with ${m}_{\mathrm{DM}}\ensuremath{\sim}500\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$. In this regime, the coannihilation channels are important. We therefore compute, for a wide range of relative velocities, the full next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to seven annihilation/coannihilation processes that contribute $\ensuremath{\sim}70%$ to the relic density of DM. These corrected cross sections are interfaced with micromegas to obtain the one-loop correction to the freeze-out relic density. Due to the accurate measurement of this observable, the one-loop corrections are relevant. We discuss the one-loop renormalization scheme dependence and point out the influence, at one-loop, of a parameter that solely describes the scattering in the dark sector. A tree-level computation of the relic density is not sensitive to this parameter.