Related papers: Heavy Thermal Relics from Zombie Collisions
The relic abundance of thermal dark matter particles is generally assumed to be inversely proportional to their annihilation rate, which is therefore constrained by the present matter density, <sigma v> ~ 10^{-26} Omega_{dm}^{-1} cm^3…
The nonbaryonic dark matter of the Universe might consist of new stable charged species, bound by ordinary Coulomb interactions in various forms of heavy neutral "dark atoms". The existing models offer natural implementations for the…
We analyze the dark matter problem in the context of brane cosmology. We investigate the impact of the non-conventional brane cosmology on the relic abundance of non-relativistic stable particles in high and low reheating scenarios. We show…
In this work, we investigate a scenario in which heavy Majorana Right-Handed Neutrinos (RHNs) are in thermal equilibrium with a dark sector with temperature higher than the Standard Model (SM) thermal bath. Specifically, we consider the…
We study a new mechanism for the production of dark matter in the universe which does not rely on thermal equilibrium. Dark matter is populated from the thermal bath subsequent to inflationary reheating via a massive mediator whose mass is…
The WIMPzilla hypothesis is that the dark matter is a super-weakly-interacting and super-heavy particle. Conventionally, the WIMPzilla abundance is set by gravitational particle production during or at the end of inflation. In this study we…
We propose a novel mechanism for the production of dark matter (DM) from a thermal bath, based on the idea that DM particles $\chi$ can transform heat bath particles $\psi$: $\chi \psi \rightarrow \chi \chi$. For a small initial abundance…
If dark matter (DM) is a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that is a thermal relic of the early Universe, then its total self-annihilation cross section is revealed by its present-day mass density. The canonical thermally averaged…
The persistent null results at dark matter (DM) direct-detection experiments have pushed the popular weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) DM to tight corners. Generic WIMP models with direct-detection rate below the current upper…
We point out a dark matter candidate which arises in a minimal extension of solutions to the hierarchy problem based on compositeness. In such models, some or all of the Standard Model fields are composites of a conformal field theory (CFT)…
We consider a modification to the standard cosmological history consisting of introducing a new species $\phi$ whose energy density red-shifts with the scale factor $a$ like $\rho_\phi \propto a^{-(4+n)}$. For $n>0$, such a red-shift is…
We investigate the thermal relic density of the cold dark matter in the context of the brane world cosmology. Since the expansion law in a high energy regime is modified from the one in the standard cosmology, if the dark matter decouples…
In this work, we explore a conversion-driven freeze-out scenario, where the next-to-lightest stable particle (NLSP) sets the dark matter (DM) abundance through the process ``NLSP SM $\leftrightarrow$ DM SM". Although DM is produced via a…
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…
Warm dark matter (WDM) may resolve the possible conflict between observed galaxy halos and the halos produced in cold dark matter (CDM) simulations. Here we present an extension of MSSM to include WDM by adding a gauge singlet fermion,…
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…
We investigate a so-called 331 extension of the Standard Model gauge sector which accommodates neutrino masses and where the lightest of the new neutral fermions in the theory is a viable particle dark matter candidate. In this model,…
Any form of dark matter which was in thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model in the early Universe must have some annihilation mechanism in order to avoid overclosure. In general, such models are now constrained by the negative…
Universal extra dimension models with Kaluza-Klein parity provide us excellent candidates for dark matter. We consider phenomenological universal extra dimension models where the Kaluza-Klein (KK) mass spectrum is different from that of the…
We re-examine unitarity bounds on the annihilation cross section of thermal-WIMP dark matter. For high-mass pointlike dark matter, it is generic to form WIMP bound states, which, together with Sommerfeld enhancement, affects the relic…