Related papers: Relaxing constraints on dark matter annihilation
We investigate dark matter (DM) production in an early matter dominated era where a heavy long-lived particle decays to radiation and DM. In addition to DM annihilation into and thermal DM production from radiation, we include direct DM…
We show that light ($\simeq$ 1 -- 30 MeV) dark matter particles can play a significant role in core-collapse supernovae, if they have relatively large annihilation and scattering cross sections, as compared to neutrinos. We find that if…
The universe has evolved through several phases as its various constituents dominated its energy content. Candidate dark matter particles may have undergone freeze-out during any such phase. While the standard freeze-out scenarios have been…
Decaying or annihilating dark matter particles could be detected through gamma-ray emission from the species they decay or annihilate into. This is usually done by modelling the flux from specific dark matter-rich objects such as the Milky…
Thermal relics lighter than an MeV contribute to the energy density of the universe at the time of nucleosynthesis and recombination. Constraints on extra radiation degrees of freedom typically exclude even the simplest of such dark…
The inner region of the Milky Way halo harbors a large amount of dark matter (DM). Given its proximity, it is one of the most promising targets to look for DM. We report on a search for the annihilations of DM particles using $\gamma$-ray…
When the vacuum like energy of the Higgs potential within the standard model undergoes electroweak phase transition, an influx of entropy into the primordial plasma can lead to a significant dilution of frozen out dark matter density that…
We summarize here our studies \cite{Chu:2022xuh,Chu:2023jyb,Chu:2024rrv} on two distinct scenarios for MeV-mass thermal dark matter freeze-out. First, we determine the minimal viable mass for dark matter below tens of MeV, considering…
Recent measurements of cosmological parameters from the microwave background radiation, type Ia supernovae, and the age of globular clusters help determine the relic matter density in the universe. It is first shown with mild cosmological…
In this paper, we calculate the relic abundance of the dark matter particles when they can annihilate into sterile neutrinos with the mass $\lesssim 100 \text{ GeV}$ in a simple model. Unlike the usual standard calculations, the sterile…
It is widely believed that the parameter space for Higgs-portal dark matter that achieves the relic abundance through thermal freeze-out has already been tightly constrained, typically at masses on the order of ${\cal O}(10-100)$ GeV. We…
Coulomb-like interactions typically has a cross section scales with velocity dependence as $\sigma=\sigma_0 v^{-4}$. The momentum transfer rate between a slightly charged dark matter and ionized particles increases significantly at low…
We consider a light scalar dark matter candidate with mass in the GeV range whose $p$-wave annihilation is enhanced through a Breit-Wigner resonance. The annihilation actually proceeds in the $s$-channel via a dark photon mediator whose…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) are expected to accrete particle dark matter around them to form ultracompact minihalos (UCMHs), if the PBHs themselves are not most of the dark matter. We show that if most dark matter is a thermal relic, then…
Hawking evaporation of primordial black holes (PBH) with masses ranging from $\sim 10^{-1}$ to $\sim 10^9$ g can generate the whole observed dark matter (DM) relic density. However, a second DM production mechanism, like freeze-out or…
The standard theoretical estimation of the thermal dark matter abundance may be significantly altered if properties of dark matter particles in the early universe and at the present cosmological epoch differ. This may happen if, e.g., a…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) have long reigned as one of the leading classes of dark matter candidates. The observed dark matter abundance can be naturally obtained by freezeout of weak-scale dark matter annihilations in the…
We study the evolution of heavy stars ($M\ge40{\rm M}_\odot$) undergoing pair-instability in the presence of annihilating dark matter. Focusing on the scenario where the dark matter is in capture-annihilation equilibrium, we model the…
We present a scenario for GeV-scale thermal dark matter that can only be tested with accelerator experiments. Dark matter is composed of dark pions arising from a confining strong interaction in the dark sector. The thermal relic density is…
The cosmological evolution can modify the dark matter (DM) properties in the early Universe to be vastly different from the properties today. Therefore, the relation between the relic abundance and the DM constraints today needs to be…