Related papers: Thermal Relics in Hidden Sectors
The observed density of dark matter is of the magnitude expected for a thermal relic weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP). In addition, the observed baryon density is within an order of magnitude of the dark matter density. This…
It has recently been shown that a subdominant hidden sector of atomic dark matter in the early universe provides a novel avenue towards resolving the Hubble ($H_0$) tension while maintaining good agreement with Cosmic Microwave Background…
In a non-standard cosmological scenario, heavy, long-lived particles, which we call moduli, dominate the energy density prior to Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) may be produced non-thermally from…
Thermal freeze-out offers an attractive explanation of the dark matter density free from fine-tuning of initial conditions. For dark matter with a mass below tens of MeV, photons, electrons, and neutrinos are the only available direct…
The thermal freeze-out mechanism for relic dark matter heavier than $O(10-100 $ TeV$)$ requires cross-sections that violate perturbative unitarity. Yet the existence of dark matter heavier than these scales is certainly plausible from a…
Many experiments exploring weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) such as direct, indirect and collider searches have been carried out until now. However, a clear signal of a WIMP has not been found yet and it makes us to suspect that…
The thermal history of the universe before the epoch of nucleosynthesis is unknown. The maximum temperature in the radiation-dominated era, which we will refer to as the reheat temperature, may have been as low as 0.7 MeV. In this paper we…
We present a new paradigm for achieving thermal relic dark matter. The mechanism arises when a nearly secluded dark sector is thermalized with the Standard Model after reheating. The freezeout process is a number-changing 3->2 annihilation…
Non-thermal dark matter generation is an appealing alternative to the standard paradigm of thermal WIMP dark matter. We reconsider non-thermal production mechanisms in a systematic way, and develop a numerical code for accurate computations…
Kinematically forbidden channels can set the freeze-out dark matter (DM) relic abundance. These channels are described by DM annihilations into heavier states, which vanish at zero temperature limit, but occur at finite temperatures in the…
Dark matter is one of the most important open problems in particle physics and cosmology. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) appear as an appealing solution, providing the right relic density with a cross-section at the…
A hidden sector that kinetically mixes with the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model provides simple and well-motivated dark matter candidates that possess many of the properties of a traditional weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP).…
The internal structure of the Standard Model implies a natural $\mathbb{Z}_4 \times \mathbb{Z}_3$ discrete gauge symmetry. Cancellation of the corresponding Dai--Freed anomalies requires the introduction of three right-handed neutrinos and…
We consider dark matter consisting of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and revisit in detail its thermal evolution in the early universe, with a particular focus on models where the annihilation rate is enhanced by the…
Thermal relic dark matter has been severely constrained in recent years by direct and indirect dark matter searches, as well as multi-messenger probes of dark sectors. At the current level of experimental precision, it has become difficult…
Kinetic decoupling of dark matter typically happens much later than chemical freeze-out. In fact, local thermal equilibrium is an important assumption for the usual relic density calculations based on solving the Boltzmann equation (for its…
In existing dark matter models with global symmetries the relic abundance of dark matter is either equal to that of anti-dark matter (thermal WIMP), or vastly larger, with essentially no remaining anti-dark matter (asymmetric dark matter).…
We comprehensively study experimental constraints and prospects for a class of minimal hidden sector dark matter (DM) models, highlighting how the cosmological history of these models informs the experimental signals. We study simple…
We propose and study a scalar extension of the Standard Model which respects a $\mathbb{Z}_3$ symmetry remnant of the spontaneous breaking of a global $U(1)_\text{DM}$ symmetry. Consequently, this model has a natural dark matter candidate…
Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs) are the most widely studied candidate particles forming the cold dark matter (CDM) whose existence can be inferred from a wealth of astrophysical and cosmological observations. In the framework…