New dark matter candidates motivated from superstring derived unification

Abstract

Perturbative gauge coupling unification in realistic superstring models suggests the existence of additional heavy down-type quarks, beyond the minimal supersymmetric standard model. The mass scale of the heavy down-type quarks is constrained by requiring agreement between the measured low energy gauge parameters and the string-scale gauge coupling unification. These additional quarks arise and may be stable due to the gauge symmetry breaking by ``Wilson lines'' in the superstring models. We argue that there is a window in the parameter space within which this down-type quark is a good candidate for the dark matter.