Related papers: Spontaneous dark-matter mass generation along cosm…
We present a new paradigm for the production of dark-matter particles called the spontaneous freeze out, in which the decoupling from the thermal bath is enforced by the sudden increase of the dark-matter mass, due to the spontaneous…
Cosmic strings can be created in the early universe during symmetry-breaking phase transitions, such as might arise if the gauge structure of the standard model is extended by additional U(1) factors at high energies. Cosmic strings present…
We consider the possibility that thermalized dark-matter particles acquire their mass thanks to the spontaneous breaking of a symmetry below some critical temperature. We describe the regime where a freeze out mechanism takes place shortly…
In dimension-less theories of dynamical generation of the weak scale, the Universe can undergo a period of low-scale inflation during which all particles are massless and super-cool. This leads to a new mechanism of generation of the…
In this paper we propose a dark matter model and study aspects of its phenomenology. Our model is based on a new dark matter sector with a U(1)' gauge symmetry plus a discrete symmetry added to the Standard Model of particle physics. The…
The origin of dark matter as a thermal relic offers a compelling way in which the early universe was initially populated by dark matter. Alternative explanations typically appear exotic compared to the simplicity of thermal production.…
We study dark matter production by decaying topological defects, in particular cosmic strings. In topological defect or "top-down" (TD) scenarios, the dark matter injection rate varies as a power law with time with exponent $p-4$. We find a…
We propose a new paradigm for the thermal production of dark matter in the early universe, in which dark-matter particles acquire their mass and freeze out spontaneously from the thermal bath after a dark phase transition takes place. The…
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 present a class of models in which the dark matter stabilization symmetry is generated by spontaneous symmetry breaking. These models naturally correlate the dark and electroweak symmetry breaking scales. The result is a generic…
We develop a string-inspired model for particle cosmology, based on a flipped SU(5)$\times$U(1) gauge group formulated in a no-scale supergravity framework. The model realizes Starobinsky-like inflation, which we assume to be followed by…
Using a modification of the Zel'dovich approximation adapted to hot dark matter, the accretion of such matter onto moving cosmic string loops is studied. It is shown that a large number of $10^{12}M_\odot$ nonlinear objects will be produced…
We propose a mechanism of nonthermal production of a neutralino cold dark matter particle, $\chi$, from the decay of cosmic strings which form from the spontaneous breaking of a U(1) gauge symmetry, such as $U_{B-L}(1)$, in an extension of…
We study the accretion of hot dark matter onto moving cosmic string loops, using an adaptation of the Zeldovich approximation to HDM. We show that a large number of nonlinear objects of mass greater than $10^{12}M_\odot$, which could be the…
We study well-motivated dark matter candidates arising from weakly-coupled hidden sectors in compactified string/$M$-theory. Imposing generic top-down constraints greatly restricts allowed candidates. By considering the possible mechanisms…
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…
Non-thermal cosmological histories are capable of greatly increasing the available parameter space of different particle physics dark matter (DM) models and are well-motivated by the ubiquity of late-decaying gravitationally coupled scalars…
We propose an alternative scenario for the dark matter generation from an evolving cosmological constant which interacts with the dominant background in certain intermediate phase of the universe, and relaxes to the observed small value at…
The main goal of this work is to pursue an investigation of cosmic string configurations focusing on possible consequences of the Lorentz-symmetry breaking by a background vector. We analyze the possibility of cosmic strings as a viable…
If the temperature of the hot thermal plasma in the Early Universe was within a few orders of magnitude of the Planck scale $M_{\rm Pl}$, then the hoop conjecture predicts the formation of microscopic black holes from particle collisions in…