Related papers: Thermal Relic Targets with Exponentially Small Cou…
We consider dark matter consisting of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and revisit in detail its thermal evolution in the early universe, with a particular focus on models where the annihilation rate is enhanced by the…
The origin of dark matter in the universe may be scalar particles produced by amplification of quantum fluctuations during a period of dilaton-driven inflation. We show, for the first time, that a single species of particles, depending on…
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…
Dark matter direct detection searches for signals coming from dark matter scattering against nuclei at a very low recoil energy scale ~ 10 keV. In this paper, a simple non-relativistic effective theory is constructed to describe…
I give a pedagogical discussion of thermal dark matter (DM) within the clockwork mechanism. The clockwork mechanism, which is a natural way to generate small numbers starting from order-one couplings, allows to have a long-lived, but…
The inability of standard non-interacting cold dark matter (CDM) to account for the small scale structure of individual galaxies has led to the suggestion that the dark matter may undergo elastic and/or inelastic scattering. We simulate the…
If the dark matter is produced in the early universe prior to Big Bang nucleosynthesis, a modified cosmological history can drastically affect the abundance of relic dark matter particles. Here, we assume that an additional species to…
Hints of direct dark matter detection coming from the DAMA, CoGeNT experiments point toward light dark matter with isospin-violating and possibly inelastic couplings. However an array of astrophysical constraints are rapidly closing the…
We present a novel mechanism for thermal dark matter production, characterized by a "bounce": the dark matter equilibrium distribution transitions from the canonical exponentially falling abundance to an exponentially rising one, resulting…
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…
Inelastic dark matter (IDM) models feature an energy threshold for scattering with Standard Model particles, which enables their consistency with the increasingly stringent limits placed by direct detection experiments. In a typical…
In models of Asymmetric Dark Matter (ADM) the relic density is set by a particle asymmetry in an analogous manner to the baryons. Here we explore the scenario in which ADM decouples from the Standard Model thermal bath during an early…
If a component of dark matter has dissipative interactions, it can cool to form compact astrophysical objects with higher density than that of conventional cold dark matter (sub)haloes. Dark matter annihilations might then appear as point…
We study the solar capture rate of inelastic dark matter with endothermic and/or exothermic interactions. By assuming that an inelastic dark matter signal will be observed in next generation direct detection experiments we can set a lower…
The combination of S-matrix unitarity and the dynamics of thermal freeze-out for massive relic particles (denoted here simply by WIMPs) implies a lower limit on the density of such particles, that provide a (potentially sub-dominant)…
Dark matter is typically assumed not to couple to the photon at tree level. While annihilation to photons through quark loops is often considered in indirect detection searches, such loop-level effects are usually neglected in direct…
Detection of electron recoils by dark matter (DM) may reveal the structure of the dark sector. We consider a scenario where a heavier DM particle inelastically scatters off an electron and is converted into a lighter DM particle. A small…
We consider the possibility of using dark matter particle's mass and its interaction cross section as a smoking gun signal of the existence of a Big Bounce at the early stage in the evolution of our currently observed universe. A study of…
It is generically believed that the two-body scattering is suppressed by higher-order weak couplings with respect to the two-body decay. We show that this does not always hold when a heavy particle is produced by forbidden decay in a…
We couple a sterile neutrino sector to a spin-3/2 particle and show that with a Planck reduced coupling, we can obtain a sufficiently long lifetime making the spin-3/2 particle a good dark matter candidate. We show that this dark matter…