Related papers: Boosting Freeze-in through Thermalization
We propose an alternate, calculable mechanism of dark matter genesis, "thermal freeze-in," involving a Feebly Interacting Massive Particle (FIMP) interacting so feebly with the thermal bath that it never attains thermal equilibrium. As with…
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…
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…
The freeze-in mechanism of dark matter production provides a simple and intriguing alternative to the WIMP paradigm. In this paper, we analyze whether freeze-in can be used to account for the dark matter in the so-called singlet fermionic…
Freeze-out or freeze-in during a period of early matter domination can yield the correct dark matter abundance for small values of the velocity-averaged annihilation cross section, $\langle \sigma_{\rm ann} v \rangle_{\rm f} < 3 \times…
We study a novel dark matter production mechanism based on the freeze-in through semi-production, i.e. the inverse semi-annihilation processes. A peculiar feature of this scenario is that the production rate is suppressed by a small initial…
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…
Thermal freeze-out or freeze-in during a period of early matter domination can give rise to the correct dark matter abundance for $\langle \sigma_{\rm ann} v \rangle_{\rm f} < 3 \times 10^{-26}$ cm$^3$ s$^{-1}$. In the standard scenario, a…
We present a new paradigm for achieving thermal relic dark matter. The mechanism arises when a nearly secluded dark sector is thermalized with the Standard Model after reheating. The freezeout process is a number-changing 3->2 annihilation…
It has recently been shown that if the dark matter is in thermal equilibrium with a sector that is highly decoupled from the Standard Model, it can freeze-out with an acceptable relic abundance, even if the dark matter is as heavy as ~1-100…
Predictivity of many non-thermal dark matter (DM) models is marred by the gravitational production background. This problem is ameliorated in models with lower reheating temperature $T_R$, which allows for dilution of gravitationally…
We consider the production of dark matter during the process of reheating after inflation. The relic density of dark matter from freeze-in depends on both the energy density and energy distribution of the inflaton scattering or decay…
We study general freeze-out scenarios where an arbitrary number of initial and final dark matter particles participate in the number-changing freeze-out interaction. We consider a simple sector with two particle species undergoing such a…
We present an overview of scenarios where the observed Dark Matter (DM) abundance consists of Feebly Interacting Massive Particles (FIMPs), produced non-thermally by the so-called freeze-in mechanism. In contrast to the usual freeze-out…
We investigate a simplified freeze-in dark-matter model in which the dark matter only interacts with the standard-model neutrinos via a light scalar. The extremely small coupling for the freeze-in mechanism is naturally realized in several…
The non-detection of dark matter may be attributed to the dark matter residing in a darker hidden sector. We explore the possibility that a hidden sector produced through the freeze-in mechanism, can further generate an even more hidden…
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…
Feebly Interacting Massive Particles (FIMPs) are dark matter candidates that never thermalize in the early universe and whose production takes place via decays and/or scatterings of thermal bath particles. If FIMPs interactions with the…
The evolution of the Universe between inflation and the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis is difficult to probe and largely unconstrained. This ignorance profoundly limits our understanding of dark matter: we cannot calculate its thermal…
Thermal freeze-out is a prominent example of dark matter (DM) production mechanism in the early Universe that can yield the correct relic density of stable weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). At the other end of the mass scale,…