{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/large-n-ightmare-dark-matter","title":"Large $N$-ightmare Dark Matter","arxiv_id":"2010.03586","date":"2020-10-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Logan Morrison","Stefano Profumo","Dean J. Robinson"],"abstract":"A dark QCD sector is a relatively minimal extension of the Standard Model (SM) that admits Dark Matter (DM) candidates but requires no portal to the visible sector beyond gravitational interactions: A \"nightmare scenario\" for DM detection. We consider a secluded dark sector containing a single flavor of light, vector-like dark quark gauged under $SU(N)$. In the large-$N$ limit, this single-flavor theory becomes highly predictive, generating two DM candidates whose masses and dynamics are described by few parameters: A light quark-antiquark bound state, the dark analog of the $\\eta'$ meson, and a heavy bound state of $N$ quarks, the dark analog of the $\\Delta^{++}$ baryon. We show that the latter may freeze-in with an abundance independent of the confinement scale, forming DM-like relics for $N \\lesssim 10$, while the former may generate DM via cannibalization and freeze-out. We study the interplay of this two-component DM system and determine the characteristic ranges of the confinement scale, dark-visible sector temperature ratio, and $N$ that admit non-excluded DM, once the effects of self-interaction constraints and bounds on effective degrees of freedom at the BBN and CMB epochs are included.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03586v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.03586v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"large-n-ightmare-dark-matter","repo_url":"https://github.com/LoganAMorrison/darksun","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}