Related papers: Chilly Dark Sectors and Asymmetric Reheating
We study in detail a scenario in which the inflaton scalar field couples to both a visible sector (VS) and a hidden sector (HS). The VS is assumed to contain the Standard Model (SM), while the HS contains a dark matter (DM) candidate. We…
The nature of dark matter (DM) and how it might interact with the particles of the Standard Model (SM) is one of greatest mysteries currently facing particle physics, and addressing these issues should provide some understanding of how the…
Dark matter freeze-in at stronger coupling is operative when the Standard Model (SM) bath temperature never exceeds the dark matter mass. An attractive feature of this scenario is that it can be probed by direct detection experiments as…
The parameter space of freeze-in dark matter (DM) with mass $m_\chi$ through light dark photon (``minimal freeze-in DM'') is currently being probed by direct detection experiments through electron and nuclear recoil. Exploring the DM…
Asymmetric reheating is a generic requirement for models of dark sectors with light species, but its implementation is usually in tension with unique phenomenologies otherwise possible in compelling theories containing dark copies of the…
In some models of thermal relic dark matter, the relic abundance may be set by inelastic scattering processes (rather than annihilations) becoming inefficient as the universe cools down. This effect has been called coscattering. We present…
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…
We present a simple model of dark matter that can address astrophysical and cosmological puzzles across a wide range of scales. The model is an application of the Secretly Asymmetric Dark Matter mechanism, where several flavors of dark…
Nearly conformal dynamics at the TeV scale as motivated by the hierarchy problem can be characterized by a stage of significant supercooling at the electroweak epoch. This has important cosmological consequences. In particular, a common…
In the early Universe, any particle carrying a conserved quantum number and in chemical equilibrium with the thermal bath will unavoidably inherit a particle-antiparticle asymmetry. A new particle of this type, if stable, would represent a…
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics provides a very successful description of fundamental particles and their interactions but it is incomplete, as neutrino masses, dark matter and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe indicate. In…
The evaporation of primordial black holes (PBH) with masses ranging from $\sim 10^{-1}$ to $\sim 10^9$ g could have generated the whole observed dark matter (DM) relic density. It is typically assumed that after being produced, its…
We study a scenario in which the expansion of the Early Universe is driven by a hot hidden sector (HS) with an initial temperature $T'$ that is significantly higher than that of the visible sector (VS), $T' \gg T$. The latter is assumed to…
We investigate the nightmare scenario of dark sectors that are made of non-abelian gauge theories with fermions, gravitationally coupled to the Standard Model (SM). While testing these scenarios is experimentally challenging, they are…
Recently there is a renewed interest in exploring the Dark sector of the universe in a more constrained way. Particularly in [1], the FIMP ( Feebly Interacting Massive Particle) scenario was shown to be realized with a minimal extension of…
We consider theories where dark matter is composed of a thermal relic of weak scale mass, whose couplings to the Standard Model (SM) are however too small to give rise to the observed abundance. Instead, the abundance is set by annihilation…
Most dark matter (DM) models set the DM relic density by some interaction with Standard Model particles. Such models generally assume the existence of Standard Model particles early on, with the DM relic density a later consequence of those…
We introduce leak-in dark matter, a novel out-of-equilibrium origin for the dark matter (DM) in the universe. We provide a comprehensive and unified discussion of a minimal, internally-thermalized, hidden sector populated from an…
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…
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…