Related papers: Non-thermal WIMPs as Dark Radiation
In this thesis, we investigate various possibilities of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter (DM) and their implications. These possibilities are important because they challenge the viability of WIMP DM in light of tight…
Large scale structure and microwave background anisotropies are studied for warm dark matter models. Two warm dark matter candidates are considered: gravitinos and sterile neutrinos. Linear large scale structure properties such as…
String scenarios typically not only predict axion-like particles (ALPs) but also significant amounts of ALP dark radiation originating from the decay of the inflaton or a more general modulus. In this paper, we study the decay of such…
Super-weakly interacting massive particles produced in the late decays of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are generic in large regions of supersymmetric parameter space and other frameworks for physics beyond the standard…
Sub-GeV thermal relic dark matter typically requires the existence of a light mediator particle. We introduce the light two-Higgs-doublet portal, illustrated by a minimal UV-complete model for sub-GeV dark matter with kinematically…
Current cosmological models and data suggest the existence of a cold Dark Matter (DM) component, however the nature of DM particles remains unknown. A favored candidate for DM is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) in the mass…
Non-thermal cosmological histories are capable of greatly increasing the available parameter space of different particle physics dark matter (DM) models and are well-motivated by the ubiquity of late-decaying gravitationally coupled scalars…
Weakly interacting slim particles (WISPs) such as hidden photons (HP) and axion-like particles (ALPs) have been proposed as cold dark matter candidates. They might be produced non-thermally via the misalignment mechanism, similarly to cold…
We propose a new alternative to the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) paradigm for dark matter. Rather than being determined by thermal freeze-out, the dark matter abundance in this scenario is set by dark matter decay, which is…
We show that self-annihilating neutralino WIMP dark matter accreted onto neutron stars may provide a mechanism to seed compact objects with long-lived lumps of strange quark matter, or strangelets, for WIMP masses above a few GeV. This…
It is quite plausible that the mass of the dark matter particle increases significantly after its freeze-out, due to a scalar field rolling to large values. We describe a realization of this scenario in the context of thermal inflation…
We explore some of the consequences of Dark Matter-photon interactions on structure formation, focusing on the evolution of cosmological perturbations and performing both an analytical and a numerical study. We compute the cosmic microwave…
The $ee\gamma\gamma +\rlap/E_T$ event observed by the CDF at Fermilab is naturally explained by dynamically supersymmetry breaking models and suggests the presence of the light gravitino which can be a warm dark matter. We consider large…
We introduce a novel dark matter scenario where the visible sector and the dark sector share a common asymmetry. The two sectors are connected through an unstable mediator with baryon number one, allowing the standard model baryon asymmetry…
Results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and recently from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) have indicated the possible existence of an extra radiation component in addition to the well…
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…
A sterile neutrino with a mass around the keV scale could be an interesting candidate for warm dark matter. Although there are several scenarios and production mechanisms known in which such a particle could yield the correct abundance,…
The heavy gravitinos in minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) models couple gravitionally and can naturally be the Superweakly Interacting Massive Particle (SuperWIMP). As plausible candidates for the cold dark matter in the universe, such…
It has been recently claimed that radio observations of nearby spiral galaxies essentially rule out a dark matter source for the galactic haze. Here we consider the low energy thermal emission from a quark nugget dark matter model in the…
We consider electrically neutral complex vector particles $V$ below the GeV mass scale that, from a low energy perspective, couple to the photon via higher dimensional form factor interactions. We derive ensuing astrophysical constraints by…