Related papers: Thermal Dark Matter From A Highly Decoupled Sector
Light dark matter is a compelling experimental target in light of stringent constraints on heavier WIMPs. However, for a sub-MeV WIMP, the universe is sufficiently well understood at temperatures below 10 MeV that there is no room for it to…
We study dark matter production from mediator decays in scenarios with an epoch of early matter domination. Particles that mediate interactions between dark matter and the standard model particles are kinematically accessible to the thermal…
The thermal freeze-out mechanism for relic dark matter heavier than $O(10-100 $ TeV$)$ requires cross-sections that violate perturbative unitarity. Yet the existence of dark matter heavier than these scales is certainly plausible from a…
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…
We consider two non-standard cosmological scenaria according to which the universe is reheated to a low reheating temperature after the late decay of a scalar field or is dominated by the kinetic energy of a quintessence field in the…
We explore the model-independent constraints from cosmology on a dark-matter particle with no prominent standard model interactions that interacts and thermalizes with other particles in a hidden sector. Without specifying detailed…
We consider a class of models in which thermal dark matter is lighter than an MeV. If dark matter thermalizes with the Standard Model below the temperature of neutrino-photon decoupling, equilibration and freeze-out cools and heats the…
We explore the viability of a boson dark matter candidate with an asymmetry between the number densities of particles and antiparticles. A simple thermal field theory analysis confirms that, under certain general conditions, this component…
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…
In this work, we present UV completions of the recently proposed number-changing Co-SIMP freeze-out mechanism. In contrast to the standard cannibalistic-type dark matter picture that occurs entirely in the dark sector, the $3\to 2$ process…
Many experiments exploring weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) such as direct, indirect and collider searches have been carried out until now. However, a clear signal of a WIMP has not been found yet and it makes us to suspect that…
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…
Thermal freeze-out is a compelling framework for naturally generating the dark matter abundance. We systematically study a broad range of dark matter and mediator particle combinations that can viably realize thermal freeze-out, focusing on…
Models with a tiny coupling $\lambda$ between the dark matter and the Standard Model, $\lambda \sim v/M_\text{Pl}\sim 10^{-16}$, can yield the measured relic abundance through the thermal process known as freeze-in. We propose to interpret…
While the paradigm of a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) has guided our search strategies for dark matter in the past decades, their null-results have stimulated growing interest in alternative explanations pointing towards…
We introduce a novel mechanism where processes that preserve the number density of the dark sector set the relic density of a thermal particulate dark matter. In a relatively degenerate multipartite dark sector if there is a considerable…
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…
We revisit the singlet scalar dark matter model in the presence of a non-standard cosmological history prior to radiation domination. We focus on the regime in which the relic abundance is set by 4-to-2 self-annihilations while the dark and…
We propose a new freeze-in dark matter candidate which feebly couples to the standard model charged leptons. The feeble interactions allow it (i) to freeze-in from the Standard Model thermal bath with its relic density being either a…
We have developed a set of four fully coupled Boltzmann equations to precisely determine the relic density and temperature of dark matter by including three distinct sectors: dark matter, light scalar, and standard model sectors. The…