Related papers: Forbidden frozen-in dark matter
We present small-scale structure constraints on sterile dark matter produced from a heavy mediator particle, inspired by models of moduli decay. Dark matter particles produced through this mechanism can contribute to the entire dark matter…
When dark matter particles only feebly interact with plasma constituents in the early universe, they never reach thermal equilibrium. As opposed to the freeze-out mechanism, where the dark matter abundance is determined at $T \ll M$, the…
If coupled \emph{feebly} to the Standard Model bath, a dark matter can evade the severe constraints from the direct search experiments. At the same time, such interactions help produce dark matter via the freeze-in mechanism. The freeze-in…
The popular freeze-out paradigm for Dark Matter (DM) production, relies on DM-baryon couplings of the order of the weak interactions. However, different search strategies for DM have failed to provide a conclusive evidence of such…
We extend the Standard Model (SM) by introducing a $U(1)'$ gauge boson and a real pseudo-scalar field, both odd under a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry. The resulting low-energy spectrum consists of a stable vector as the dark matter candidate, and…
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…
Freeze-in dark matter (DM) mediated by a light ($\ll$ keV) weakly-coupled dark-photon is an important benchmark for the emerging low-mass direct detection program. Since this is one of the only predictive, detectable freeze-in models, we…
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…
The existence of a light mediator is beneficial to some phenomena in astroparticle physics, such as the core-cusp problem and diversity problem. It can decouple from Standard Model to avoid direct detection constraints, generally realized…
We investigate a low-reheating-temperature freeze-in scenario within a minimal model of fermionic dark matter interacting through a pseudoscalar mediator. In this setup, dark matter is produced via the decay of the pseudoscalar, which…
Dark matter may be coupled to dark radiation: light degrees of freedom that mediate forces between dark sector particles. Cosmological constraints favor dark radiation that is colder than Standard Model radiation. In models with fixed…
The cosmological abundance of dark matter can be significantly influenced by the temperature dependence of particle masses and vacuum expectation values. We illustrate this point in three simple freeze-in models. The first one, which we…
We consider thermal production mechanisms of self-interacting dark matter in models with gauged $Z_3$ symmetry. A complex scalar dark matter is stabilized by the $Z_3$, that is the remnant of a local dark $U(1)_d$. Light dark matter with…
We study inelastic dark matter produced via freeze-in through a light mediator with a mass splitting below the electron-positron threshold. In this regime, the heavier dark matter state is naturally long-lived compared to the age of the…
In this study, we explore vector dark matter (DM) production in the early Universe focusing on a scenario with a low reheating temperature. One can achieve low reheat temperature in many ways, for example, by considering a longer lifetime…
We consider the possibility that along the thermal history of the Universe, dark matter (DM) would have been created from Standard Model particles, either through a kinetic mixing portal to an extra U(1) gauge field, or through the Higgs…
The freeze-in mechanism describes the out-of-equilibrium production of dark matter (DM) particles via feeble couplings or non-renormalisable interactions with large suppression scales. In the latter case, predictions suffer from a strong…
We investigate dark matter (DM) production in an early matter dominated era where a heavy long-lived particle decays to radiation and DM. In addition to DM annihilation into and thermal DM production from radiation, we include direct DM…
We study the genesis of dark matter in the primordial Universe for representative classes of Z'-portals models. For weak-scale Z' mediators we compute the range of values of the kinetic mixing allowed by WMAP/PLANCK experiments…
The clockwork mechanism allows extremely weak interactions and small mass scales to be understood in terms of the structure of a theory. A natural application of the clockwork mechanism is to the freeze-in mechanism for dark matter…