A forgotten fermion: the hypercharge -3/2 doublet, its phenomenology and connections to dark matter

Abstract

A weak-doublet with hypercharge $-3/2$ is one of only a handful of fermions which has a renormalisable interaction with Standard Model fields. This should make it worthy of attention, but it has thus far received little consideration in the literature. In this paper, we perform a thorough investigation of the phenomenology which results from the introduction of this field, $F$. After expressing the model in terms of its effective field theory at dimension-6, we compute a range of electroweak and leptonic observables, the most stringent of which probe up to $M_F \sim 300$ TeV. The simplicity of this scenario makes it very predictive and allows us to correlate the different processes. We then study how this new fermion can connect the SM to various simple but distinct dark sectors. Some of the most minimal cases of $F$-mediated dark matter (DM) involve frozen-in keV-scale scalar DM, which may produce x-ray lines, and frozen-out TeV-scale fermionic DM.