Related papers: Chilly Dark Sectors and Asymmetric Reheating
Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…
The relic abundance of particle and antiparticle dark matter (DM) need not be vastly different in thermal asymmetric dark matter (ADM) models. By considering the effect of a primordial asymmetry on the thermal Boltzmann evolution of coupled…
The prediction of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature and tensor fluctuations is among the main features of cosmic inflation. The current measurements of the primordial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
A rapid phase of accelerated expansion in the early universe, known as inflation, dilutes all matter except the vacuum induced quantum fluctuations. These are responsible for seeding the initial perturbations in the baryonic matter, the…
A new concept of generation of the cosmological baryon excess along with the cold dark matter (CDM) in the Universe is proposed and corresponding scenarios are outlined. Possible realizations of the idea in the framework of supersymmetric…
We consider a simple extension of the standard model with fermionic dark matter (DM) and a $Z'$ gauge boson acting as a mediator. We also assume a scenario where cosmic reheating occurs at low temperatures due to the decay of a massive…
The class of `Asymmetric Dark Matter' scenarios relies on the existence of a primordial particle/anti-particle asymmetry in the dark sector related to the baryon asymmetry as a way to address the observed similarity between the baryonic and…
Low-scale supersymmetry breaking in string motivated theories implies the presence of O(100) TeV scale moduli, which generically lead to a significant modification of the history of the universe prior to Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Such an…
We propose a novel framework where baryon asymmetry can arise due to forbidden decay of dark matter (DM) enabled by finite temperature effects in the early universe. In order to implement it in a realistic setup, we consider the DM to be a…
Freeze-out or freeze-in during a period of early matter domination can yield the correct dark matter abundance for small values of the velocity-averaged annihilation cross section, $\langle \sigma_{\rm ann} v \rangle_{\rm f} < 3 \times…
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…
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…
We discuss the relic density of asymmetric dark matter with long-range interactions in non-standard cosmological scenarios where the extra cosmic energy is introduced. The Hubble expansion rate is modified in non-standard cosmological…
Thermal freeze-out is a prominent example of dark matter (DM) production mechanism in the early Universe that can yield the correct relic density of stable weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). At the other end of the mass scale,…
It is usually assumed that dark matter is produced during the radiation dominated era. There is, however, no direct evidence for radiation domination prior to big-bang nucleosynthesis. Two non-standard thermal histories are considered. In…
We present a thorough analysis of the sequential freeze-in mechanism for dark matter production in the early universe. In this mechanism the dark matter relic density results from pair annihilation of mediator particles which are themselves…
We study a novel dark matter production mechanism based on the freeze-in through semi-production, i.e. the inverse semi-annihilation processes. A peculiar feature of this scenario is that the production rate is suppressed by a small initial…
We propose a new scenario for generating a relic density of non-relativistic dark matter in the context of heterotic string theory. Contrary to standard thermal freeze-out scenarios, dark-matter particles are abundantly produced while still…
One of the greatest mysteries in astrophysics and cosmology is the nature and the origin of cold dark matter, which represents more than 84% of the mass in the universe. Dark matter reacts on and produces gravitational forces and governs…
For non-relativistic thermal dark matter, close-to-threshold effects largely dominate the evolution of the number density for most of the times after thermal freeze-out, and hence affect the cosmological relic density. A precise evaluation…