Gluequark dark matter

Abstract

We introduce the gluequark Dark Matter candidate, an accidentally stable bound state made of adjoint fermions and gluons from a new confining gauge force. Such scenario displays an unusual cosmological history where perturbative freeze-out is followed by a non-perturbative re-annihilation period with possible entropy injection. When the gluequark has electroweak quantum numbers, the critical density is obtained for masses as large as PeV. Independently of its mass, the size of the gluequark is determined by the confinement scale of the theory, leading at low energies to annihilation rates and elastic cross sections which are large for particle physics standards and potentially observable in indirect detection experiments.