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.