Related papers: Kinetic Decoupling and Small-Scale Structure in Ef…
The kinetic decoupling of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in the early universe sets a scale that can directly be translated into a small-scale cutoff in the spectrum of matter density fluctuations. The formalism presented here…
Dark matter kinetic decoupling involves elastic scattering of dark matter off of leptons and quarks in the early universe, the same process relevant for direct detection and for the capture rate of dark matter in celestial bodies; the…
We calculate the kinetic-decoupling temperature for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in supersymmetric (SUSY) and universal-extra-dimension (UED) models that can account for the cold-dark-matter abundance determined from cosmic…
We study the kinetic decoupling of light (lesssim 10 GeV) magnetic dipole dark matter (DM). We find that present bounds from collider, direct DM searches, and structure formation allow magnetic dipole DM to remain in thermal equilibrium…
Calculating the abundance of thermally produced dark matter particles has become a standard procedure, with sophisticated methods guaranteeing a precision that matches the percent-level accuracy in the observational determination of the…
After neutralinos cease annihilating in the early Universe, they may still scatter elastically from other particles in the primordial plasma. At some point in time, however, they will eventually stop scattering. We calculate the cross…
The kinetic decoupling of dark matter (DM) from the primordial plasma sets the size of the first and smallest dark matter halos. Studies of the DM kinetic decoupling have hitherto mostly neglected interactions between the DM and the quarks…
Warm dark matter cosmologies have been widely studied as an alternative to the cold dark matter paradigm, the characteristic feature being a suppression of structure formation on small cosmological scales. A very similar situation occurs if…
We argue that the acoustic damping of the matter power spectrum is not a generic feature of the kinetic decoupling of dark matter, but even the enhancement can be realized depending on the nature of the kinetic decoupling when compared to…
The large gap between a galactic dark matter subhalo's velocity and its own gravitational binding velocity creates the situation that small subhalos can be evaporated before dark matter thermalize with baryons due to the low binding…
The early kinetic decoupling (eKD) effect is an inevitable ingredient in calculating the relic density of dark matter (DM) for various well-motivated scenarios. It appears naturally in forbidden dark matter annihilation, the main focus of…
Weakly interacting massive particles are part of the lepton-photon plasma in the early universe until kinetic decoupling, after which time the particles behave like a collisionless gas with nonzero temperature. The Boltzmann equation for…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are arguably the most natural DM candidates from a particle physics point of view. After their number density has frozen out in the early universe, determining their relic density today, WIMPs…
We study the possibility that dark matter re-enters kinetic equilibrium with a radiation bath after kinetic decoupling, a scenario we dub kinetic recoupling. This naturally occurs, for instance, with certain types of resonantly-enhanced…
One of the best motivated hypotheses in cosmology states that most of the matter in the universe is in the form of weakly-interacting massive particles that decoupled early in the history of the universe and cooled adiabatically to an…
Molecular cooling is essential for studying the formation of sub-structure of dissipative dark-matter halos that may host compact objects such as black holes. Here, we analyze the reaction rates relevant for the formation, dissociation, and…
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 the cold dark matter scenario, the smallest dark matter halos may be earth mass or smaller. These microhalos would be the densest dark matter objects in the Universe, making their accurate characterization important for astrophysical…
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…
We study how the indirect observation of dark matter substructures in the Milky Way, using recent stellar stream studies, translates into constraints for different dark matter models. Particularly, we use the measured number of dark…