Related papers: Thermal Dark Matter From A Highly Decoupled Sector
Dark matter produced from thermal freeze-out is typically restricted to have masses above roughly 1 MeV. However, if the couplings are small, the freeze-in mechanism allows for production of dark matter down to keV masses. We consider dark…
At the tail of its velocity distribution, cold dark matter (DM) can annihilate at finite temperature to states heavier than itself. We explore the possibility that DM freezeout is dictated by these "forbidden annihilations" at the…
In extended supersymmetric models with a hidden sector the lightest $R$-parity odd particle can reside in the hidden sector and act as dark matter. We consider the case when the hidden sector has ultraweak interactions with the visible…
Particle production at the end of a first-order electroweak phase transition may be rather generic in theories beyond the standard model. Dark matter may then be abundantly produced by this mechanism if it has a sizable coupling to the…
We consider a generic mechanism via which thermal relic WIMP dark matter may be decoupled from the Standard Model, namely through a combination of WIMP annihilation to metastable mediators with subsequent delayed decay to Standard Model…
We consider dark matter (DM) with very weak couplings to the standard model (SM), such that its self-annihilation cross section is much smaller than the canonical one, $\langle\sigma v\rangle_{\chi\chi} \ll…
We study the possibility that, after inflation, the inflaton reaches thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model thermal bath and eventually freezes-out in the non-relativistic regime. When the inflaton decay is the sole source of…
We show that the decay of the inflaton field may be incomplete, while nevertheless successfully reheating the universe and leaving a stable remnant that accounts for the present dark matter abundance. We note, in particular, that since the…
We present a class of dark matter models, in which the dark matter particle is a feebly interacting massive particle (FIMP) produced via the decay of an electrically charged and/or colored parent particle. Given the feeble interaction, dark…
We show that dark matter could be made of massive gauge bosons whose stability doesn't require to impose by hand any discrete or global symmetry. Stability of gauge bosons can be guaranteed by the custodial symmetry associated to the gauge…
WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle), FIMP (Feebly interacting Massive Particle) and EWIP (Extremely Weakly Interacting Particle) dark matter are different theoretical frameworks that have been postulated to explain the dark matter.…
Decaying dark matter models provide a physically motivated way of channeling energy between the matter and radiation sectors. In principle, this could affect the predicted value of the Hubble constant in such a way as to accommodate the…
We show that a star orbiting close enough to an adiabatically grown supermassive black hole can capture a large number of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) during its lifetime. WIMP annihilation energy release in low- to…
Can dark matter be stabilized by charge conservation, just as the electron is in the standard model? We examine the possibility that dark matter is hidden, that is, neutral under all standard model gauge interactions, but charged under an…
The standard theoretical estimation of the thermal dark matter abundance may be significantly altered if properties of dark matter particles in the early universe and at the present cosmological epoch differ. This may happen if, e.g., a…
We explore the possibility that the dark matter relic density is not produced by thermal mechanism directly, but by the decay of other heavier dark sector particles which on the other hand can be produced by the thermal freeze-out…
Producing an acceptable thermal relic abundance of dark matter with masses $\gg 10^2$ TeV is a challenge. We propose a novel mechanism where GeV-scale states establish a tiny thermal relic abundance for dark matter, which is later promoted…
The recent analysis from the SH0ES Collaboration has confirmed the existence of a Hubble tension between measurements at high redshift ($z> 1000$) and at low redshift ($z<1$) at the $5\sigma$ level with the low redshift measurement giving a…
A variety of supergravity and string based models contain hidden sectors which can play a role in particle physics phenomena and in cosmology. In this note we discuss the possibility that the visible sector and the hidden sectors in general…
A period of early matter domination can give rise to the correct dark matter abundance for a broad range of dark matter annihilation rate $\langle \sigma_{\rm ann} v \rangle_{\rm f}$. Here, we examine this scenario for situations where…