I recently got confused (and slightly annoyed by the lack of technical details)
ID: 1377253 • Letter: I
Question
I recently got confused (and slightly annoyed by the lack of technical details) when reading a popular article (authored by Jonathan Feng and Mark Trodden) introducing the concept of super WIMPs.
The article characterized super WIMPs (without giving more detailed explanations) as follows:
WIMPs could probably decay to so-called super WIMPs, which would only gravitationally interact with visible matter
different kinds of super WIMP particles could interact via additional newly postulated weak "dark forces" ( = gauge bosons ?) with each other
this kind of dark matter particles can probably interact with dark energy ( how? What is dark energy in this particular scenarios suposed to be? )
the authors vaguely stated the super WIMP models are some kind of extensions of supersymmetric models that lead to the "ordinary" WIMPs
From this characterization I really dont get what super WIMPs are suposed to be so my question is:
What are the underlying theoretical ideas behind these phenomenological models? Are they derived in some "top down" approach from high energy theories or is some "buttom up" extension of something like the MSSM for example applied ?
And I would appreciate a technically more accurate description of the super WIMP particles and their interactions.
Explanation / Answer
I think you're being a bit hard on Scientific American. It is a popular (if slightly geeky) magazine so you wouldn't expect its articles to have all the gory details.
The best way to find info about areas like this is to search arxiv.org. For example googling for "super wimp site:arxiv.org/abs" finds http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.0432 and this looks like a good place to start.
There have been various suggestions for particles that only interact by the gravitational force. One example is the sterile neutrino.