Neutron decay into a Dark Sector via Leptoquarks

• Sara Khatibi (University of Tehran)

In this talk, neutron lifetime anomaly will be introduced, one of the intriguing challenges in particle physics. Then, we will show that if we introduce Leptoquarks (LQ) coupling to scalar dark matter (DM), there is an exotic decay channel for the neutron into scalar DM and an SM anti-neutrino. If the branching ratio of this new neutron decay channel is 1%, a long-standing discrepancy in the measured neutron lifetime between two different experimental methods, bottle and beam experiments, can be solved. The mass of the scalar DM produced from neutron decay should be in a narrow range and as a result, its production in the early universe is challenging. We will discuss that the freeze-in mechanism can produce this scalar DM in the early universe with the correct relic abundance. Then we will show that the model can simultaneously explain other SM anomalies like the muon (g − 2) and RD(∗) anomalies.