Related papers: On thermal corrections to near-threshold annihilat…
We study the next-to-leading order (NLO) virtual and thermal corrections to relativistic $2 \rightarrow 2$ scattering processes involving scalar particles in the early Universe thermal plasma. Taking the example of freeze-in production of…
Supersymmetric particles at the multi-TeV scale will escape direct detection at planned future colliders. However, such particles induce non-decoupling corrections in processes involving the accessible superparticles through violations of…
Light dark-matter ($M\leq20$ MeV) particles freeze out after neutrino decoupling. If the dark-matter particle couples to a neutrino or an electromagnetic plasma, the late time entropy production from dark-matter annihilation can change the…
Dark Matter could be a composite state of a confining sector with an approximate scale symmetry. We consider the case where the associated pseudo-Goldstone boson, the dilaton, mediates its interactions with the Standard Model. When the…
The final-state particles from cosmological dark matter co-annihilation are expected to equilibrate. As dictated by Hard Thermal Loop resummation, the spectrum of equilibrated quasiparticles is richer than in vacuum, with a massless gauge…
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…
We show that the relic abundance of thermal dark matter annihilating via a long-range interaction, is significantly affected by the formation and decay of dark matter bound states in the early universe, if the dark matter mass is above a…
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…
We investigate scenarios in which dark matter interacts with the Standard Model primarily through electroweak gauge bosons. We employ an effective field theory framework wherein the Standard Model and the dark matter particle are the only…
We compute the bounds on the dark matter (DM) annihilation cross section using the most recent Cosmic Microwave Background measurements from WMAP9, SPT'11 and ACT'10. We consider DM with mass in the MeV-TeV range annihilating 100% into…
Thermal dark matter that couples more strongly to electrons and photons than to neutrinos will heat the electron-photon plasma relative to the neutrino background if it becomes nonrelativistic after the neutrinos decouple from the thermal…
In some scenarios for the early universe, non-relativistic thermal dark matter chemically decouples from the thermal environment once the temperature drops well below the dark matter mass. The value at which the energy density freezes out…
When thermal rate equations are derived for the evolution of slow variables, it is often practical to parametrize the right-hand side with chemical potentials. To close the system, the chemical potentials are subsequently re-expressed in…
Measurements of supersymmetric particle couplings provide important verification of supersymmetry. If some of the superpartners are at the multi-TeV scale, they will escape direct detection at planned future colliders. However, such…
We reexamine the consequences of perturbative unitarity on dark matter freeze-out when both Sommerfeld enhancement and bound state formation affect dark matter annihilations. At leading order (LO) the annihilation cross-section is infrared…
Annihilations of weakly interacting dark matter particles provide an important signature for the possibility of indirect detection of dark matter in galaxy halos. These self-annihilations can be greatly enhanced in the vicinity of a massive…
The computation of the energy spectra of Standard Model particles originated from the annihilation/decay of dark matter particles is of primary importance in indirect searches of dark matter. We compute how the inclusion of electroweak…
We consider dark matter annihilation into Standard Model particles and show that the least detectable final states, namely neutrinos, define an upper bound on the total cross section. Calculating the cosmic diffuse neutrino signal, and…
The nature of dark matter is one of the most thrilling riddles for both cosmology and particle physics nowadays. While in the typical models the dark sector is composed only by weakly interacting massive particles, an arguably more natural…
In thermal dark matter models, allowing the dark matter candidate to coannihilate with another particle can considerably loosen the relic density constraints on the dark matter mass. In particular, introducing a single strongly interacting…