Taming lepton portal dark matter by a non-invertible selection rule

Abstract

We point out that a non-invertible selection rule can control the flavor violation inherent in lepton portal dark matter, a weakly interacting massive particle candidate that can evade severe constraints from direct detection experiments. We show that ordinary invertible symmetries cannot suppress flavor-violating portal couplings while accommodating the large mixing angles in the PMNS matrix. We then present a simple construction based on the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauging of a $\mathbb{Z}_5$ symmetry, which realizes one-flavor dominance of the portal couplings consistently with the PMNS mixing matrix. We also discuss possible flavor leakage in a type-I seesaw completion and study experimental probes of the model through lepton observables, especially lepton flavor non-universality in $Z$ boson decays.