Related papers: Gravitational misalignment mechanism of Dark Matte…
We investigate the gravitational production of scalar dark matter particles during the inflationary and reheating epochs. The oscillatory behavior of the curvature scalar $R$ during the reheating phase generates two different enhancement…
We show that in large-field inflationary scenarios, superheavy (many orders of magnitude larger than the weak scale) dark matter will be produced in cosmologically interesting quantities if superheavy stable particles exist in the mass…
We study in detail the recently proposed mechanism of generating superheavy Dark Matter with the mass larger than the Hubble rate at the end of inflation. A real scalar field constituting Dark Matter linearly couples to the inflaton. As a…
The conventional misalignment mechanism for scalar dark matter depends on the initial field value, which governs the oscillation amplitude and present-day abundance. We present a mechanism by which a feeble (Planck-suppressed) coupling of…
We generalize dark matter production to a two-metric framework whereby the physical metric, which couples to the Standard Model (SM), is conformally and/or disformally related to the metric governing the gravitational dynamics. We show that…
A light singlet scalar field feebly coupled through the super-renormalizable Higgs portal provides a minimal and well-motivated realization of ultra-light bosonic dark matter. We study the cosmological production of dark matter in this…
We show that the present dark matter abundance can be accounted for by an oscillating scalar field that acquires both mass and a non-zero expectation value from interactions with the Higgs field. The dark matter scalar field can be…
Oscillating ultra-light scalar fields are a natural explanation for the dark matter in our universe, as long as a mechanism, often called a misalignment mechanism, exists to explain the amplitude of the scalar oscillations. If the dark…
We demonstrate that adiabatic dark matter can be generated by gravity induced symmetry breaking during inflation. We study a $Z_2$ symmetric scalar singlet that couples to other fields only through gravity and for which the symmetry is…
Thermal misalignment provides an alternative to the standard misalignment mechanism for the cosmological production of scalar dark matter. In this framework, feeble couplings to particles in the thermal bath generate a finite-temperature…
Dark matter modeled as a classical scalar field that interacts only with gravity and with itself by a potential that is close to quartic at large field values and approaches a quadratic form when the field is small would be gravitationally…
Gravitino production in the primordial Universe is investigated into details. After briefly reviewing inflation, supersymmetry and supergravity, we first study the scattering of massive W bosons in the thermal bath of particles, during the…
We study the phenomenon of gravitational particle production as applied to a scalar spectator field in the context of $\alpha$-attractor inflation. Assuming that the scalar has a minimal coupling to gravity, we calculate the abundance of…
Motivated by their potential role as dark matter, we study the cosmological evolution of light scalar and vector fields non-minimally coupled to gravity. Our focus is on a situation where the dominant contribution to the energy density…
We propose a new non-thermal mechanism of dark matter production based on vacuum misalignment. A global $X$-charge asymmetry is generated at high temperatures, under which both the will-be Higgs and the dark matter are charged. At lower…
We explore the cosmology and phenomenology of millicharged and millicharge-like dark matter with masses from 1 eV to 10 keV and charges of $10^{-18}$ to $10^{-14}$. Dark matter in this mass range cannot be thermally produced, but can arise…
We consider the possibility of an oscillating scalar field accounting for dark matter and dynamically controlling the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak symmetry through a Higgs-portal coupling. This requires a late decay of the…
A coherent field over the entire universe is an attractive picture in studying the dark sector of the universe. The misalignment mechanism, which relies on inflation to achieve homogeneousness of the field, is a popular mechanism for…
We examine the possibility that dark matter (DM) may be an ultralight scalar that was misaligned via non-minimal coupling to gravity, in the early Universe. For a certain regime of scalar masses, gravitational effects in neutron stars could…
The observed dark matter abundance in the Universe can be fully accounted for by a minimally coupled spectator scalar field that was light during inflation and has sufficiently strong self-coupling. In this scenario, dark matter was…