Related papers: Getting a THUMP from a WIMP
There are many reasons to believe the present mass density of the universe is dominated by a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), a fossil relic of the early universe. Theoretical ideas and experimental efforts have focused mostly on…
One of the most popular classes of candidates for dark matter are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), i.e. particles possessing masses and couplings falling roughly within the electroweak scale. Apart from offering a natural…
As experimental null results increase the pressure on heavy weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) as an explanation of thermal dark matter (DM), it seems timely to explore previously overlooked regions of the WIMP parameter space. In…
A weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) is a leading candidate of the dark matter. The WIMP dark matter abundance is determined by the freeze-out mechanism. Once we know the property of the WIMP particle such as the mass and…
The singlet scalar model is a minimal extension of the Standard Model that can explain the dark matter. We point out that in this model the dark matter constraint can be satisfied not only in the already considered WIMP regime but also, for…
Sub-GeV dark matter is an appealing thermal target because it can still be produced via the standard freeze-out mechanism; at such low masses, achieving freeze-out naturally points to the presence of a light mediator, which shifts the most…
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…
Many experiments exploring weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) such as direct, indirect and collider searches have been carried out until now. However, a clear signal of a WIMP has not been found yet and it makes us to suspect that…
We present a scenario for non-thermal production of dark matter from evaporation of primordial black holes. A period of very early matter domination leads to formation of black holes with a maximum mass of $\simeq 2 \times 10^8$ g, whose…
Thermal relic dark matter below $\sim 10 \ \text{GeV}$ is excluded by cosmic microwave background data if its annihilation to visible particles is unsuppressed near the epoch of recombination. Usual model-building measures to avoid this…
Dark matter (DM) could be a pseudo-Dirac thermal relic with a small mass splitting that is coupled off-diagonally to a kinetically mixed dark photon. This model, particularly in the sub-GeV mass range, is a key benchmark for accelerator…
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…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are among the favored candidates for cold dark matter in the universe. The phenomenology of supersymmetric WIMPs has been quite developed during recent years. However, there are other…
The observed density of dark matter is of the magnitude expected for a thermal relic weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP). In addition, the observed baryon density is within an order of magnitude of the dark matter density. This…
The era of precision cosmology has revealed that about 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter. Two well-motivated candidates are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and weakly interacting sub-eV particles (WISPs) (e.g.…
We study the general properties of the freezeout of a thermal relic. We give analytic estimates of the relic abundance for an arbitrary freezeout process, showing when instantaneous freezeout is appropriate and how it can be corrected when…
Particles with TeV mass and strong self-interactions generically have the right annihilation cross section to explain an observed excess of cosmic electrons and positrons if the end-product of the annihilation is charged leptons. We present…
Gravitinos with a mass in the keV range are an interesting candidate for warm dark matter. Recent measurements of the matter density of the universe and of cosmic structures at the dwarf galaxy scale rule out the simplest gravitino models…
Kibble mechanism drastically underestimates the production of topological defects, as confirmed recently in atomic and condensed matter systems. If non-thermally produced, they can be cosmological dark matter of mass 1-10 PeV. If…
Light dark matter is a compelling experimental target in light of stringent constraints on heavier WIMPs. However, for a sub-MeV WIMP, the universe is sufficiently well understood at temperatures below 10 MeV that there is no room for it to…