Related papers: Lightish but clumpy: scalar dark matter from infla…
It is well known that light scalar fields present during inflation are coherently excited. We show that if the field couples to gravity in a non-minimal way, the fluctuations at large scales are suppressed with respect to the small scales…
We calculate the production of a massive vector boson by quantum fluctuations during inflation. This gives a novel dark-matter production mechanism quite distinct from misalignment or thermal production. While scalars and tensors are…
The observed dark matter abundance in the Universe can be fully accounted for by a minimally coupled spectator scalar field that was light during inflation and has sufficiently strong self-coupling. In this scenario, dark matter was…
Scale-invariant fluctuations and cold dark matter could originate from two different modes of a single scalar field, fluctuations from massless Goldstone oscillations and matter from massive Higgs modes. Matching the fluctuations and dark…
A curved space-time is known to act as a source for particle production in environments where gravity plays a significant role. We explore this effect in a minimal setup of cosmic inflation on the production of a scalar dark matter…
Motivated by their potential role as dark matter, we study the cosmological evolution of light scalar and vector fields non-minimally coupled to gravity. Our focus is on a situation where the dominant contribution to the energy density…
We consider an ultra-light scalar field with a mass comparable to (or lighter than) the Hubble parameter of the present universe, and calculate the time evolution of the energy-momentum tensor of the vacuum fluctuations generated during and…
The origin of dark matter in the universe may be weakly interacting scalar particles produced by amplification of quantum fluctuations during a period of dilaton-driven inflation. We present two interesting cases, the case of small…
Light scalar fields acquire isocurvature fluctuations during inflation. While these fluctuations could lead to interesting observable signatures at small scales, they are strongly constrained on large scales by cosmic microwave background…
We present a scenario of vector dark matter production from symmetry breaking at the end of inflation. In this model, the accumulated energy density associated with the quantum fluctuations of the dark photon accounts for the present energy…
Light new vector bosons can be produced gravitationally through quantum fluctuations during inflation; if these particles are feebly coupled and cosmologically metastable, they can account for the observed dark matter abundance. However, in…
We study minimal versions of Higgs inflation in the presence of a massless QCD axion. While the inflationary energy scale of the metric variant is too high to accommodate isocurvature bounds, it was argued that Palatini Higgs inflation…
We describe a general scenario, dubbed "Inflatable Dark Matter", in which the density of dark matter particles can be reduced through a short period of late-time inflation in the early universe. The overproduction of dark matter that is…
Building on recently constructed inflationary vector dark matter production mechanisms as well as studies of magnetogenesis, we show that an inflationary dark Schwinger mechanism can generate the observed dark matter relic abundance for…
A better understanding of the formation of large-scale structure in the Universe is arguably the most pressing question in cosmology. The most compelling and promising theoretical paradigm, Inflation + Cold Dark Matter, holds that the…
If inflation scale is high, light scalars acquire large quantum fluctuations during inflation.If sufficiently long-lived, they will give rise to CDM isocurvature perturbations, which are highly constrained by the Planck data. Focusing on…
We examine an intriguing possibility that a single field is responsible for both inflation and dark matter, focussing on the minimal set-up where inflation is driven by a scalar coupling to curvature. We study in detail the reheating…
Light scalar and pseudoscalar particles are compelling dark matter candidates, with a vast running experimental program to discover them. Previous studies have shown that these light fields can generate sizable isocurvature perturbations in…
We show that the present dark matter abundance can be accounted for by an oscillating scalar field that acquires both mass and a non-zero expectation value from interactions with the Higgs field. The dark matter scalar field can be…
We show that current cosmic acceleration can be explained by an almost massless scalar field experiencing quantum fluctuations during primordial inflation. Provided its mass does not exceed the Hubble parameter today, this field has been…