Lepton dark matter portal in the inert Zee model

Abstract

The inert Zee model is an extension of the Zee model for neutrino masses. This new model explains the dark matter relic abundance, generates a one-loop neutrino masses and forbids tree-level Higgs-mediated flavor changing neutral currents. Although the dark matter phenomenology of the model is similar to that of the inert doublet model, the presence of new vector-like fermions opens the lepton portal as a new dark matter annihilation channel. We study the impact of such a new portal in the low mass regime and show the parameter space allowed by direct and indirect searches of dark matter. Remarkably, we show that the region for $m_{H^0} \lesssim$ 70 GeV is recovered for $\lambda_L \lesssim 10^{-3}$. We also show that future experiments like LZ and DARWIN could test a large region of the parameter space of the model.