Related papers: Dark Radiation from Inflationary Fluctuations
It is possible that the strongest interactions between dark matter and the Standard Model occur via the neutrino sector. Unlike gamma rays and charged particles, neutrinos provide a unique avenue to probe for astrophysical sources of dark…
We discuss the possible sources of dark matter axions in the early universe. In the standard thermal scenario, an axion string network forms at the Peccei-Quinn phase transition $T\sim \fa$ and then radiatively decays into a cosmological…
Thermal relics lighter than an MeV contribute to the energy density of the universe at the time of nucleosynthesis and recombination. Constraints on extra radiation degrees of freedom typically exclude even the simplest of such dark…
We consider the cosmological production of fermionic dark matter during inflation and a post-inflationary radiation dominated era. This fermion \emph{only interacts gravitationally}, has a mass $m$ much smaller than the Hubble scale during…
We study Topological Defects (TD) in hidden (mirror) matter as possible sources of ultra-high energy neutrinos. The hidden/mirror and ordinary matter are assumed to interact very weakly through gravity or superheavy particles. An…
Cosmological first order phase transitions are typically associated with physics beyond the Standard Model, and thus of great theoretical and observational interest. Models of phase transitions where the energy is mostly converted to dark…
It is proposed that after the macroscopic fluctuation of energy density that is responsible for inflation dies away, a class of microscopic fluctuations, always present, survives to give the present day dark energy. This latter is simply a…
The recent global fit of short baseline neutrino oscillation data favors the presence of one (or more) sterile neutrino state which leads to new mass splitting \Delta m^2 ~1 eV^2. We consider the effect of this new states on the evolution…
The spectrum of MSSM admits solitons carrying baryonic charge, or B-balls. In an inflationary universe they can be produced in significant numbers by a break-up of a scalar condensate along the flat directions. It is shown that if SUSY…
A very light boson of mass $\mathcal{O}(10^{-22})$ eV may potentially be a viable dark matter (DM) candidate which can avoid phenomenological problems associated with cold DM. Such "fuzzy DM (FDM)" may naturally be an axion with a decay…
We describe a simple and efficient mechanism by which very heavy particles are copiously created from a primordial inflationary epoch. It works for scalar fields which are massless or very light during inflation and acquire a large mass…
We show that resonant processes during multi-field inflation can generate a large curvature perturbation on small scales. This perturbation naturally leads to the formation of primordial black holes that may constitute dark matter, as well…
Prediction of inflationary observables from the temperature fluctuation of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) can play a pivotal role in predicting the reheating dynamics in the early universe. In this work, we highlight how the inflationary…
Inflationary expansion of space-time provides us with an efficient particle production mechanism in the Early Universe. The fermion production efficiency depends critically on the particle mass, which is generated via the Yukawa coupling…
We focus on a novel baryon-number ($\mathcal{B}$) violating process within neutron stars, where two neutrons convert into two dark photons ($nn \rightarrow VV$) via new Higgs-like scalar bosons. This process is believed to be greatly…
Reheating in string compactifications is generically driven by the decay of the lightest modulus which produces Standard Model particles, dark matter and light hidden sector degrees of freedom that behave as dark radiation. This common…
If inflation scale is high, light scalars acquire large quantum fluctuations during inflation.If sufficiently long-lived, they will give rise to CDM isocurvature perturbations, which are highly constrained by the Planck data. Focusing on…
Decaying dark matter has previously been proposed as a possible explanation for the excess high energy cosmic ray electrons and positrons seen by PAMELA and the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope (FGST). To accommodate these signals however,…
A generic prediction of the Coleman-Weinberg inflation is the existence of a heavy particle sector whose interactions with the inflaton, the lightest state in this sector, generate the inflaton potential at loop level. For typical…
In this letter, we explore the phenomenological impact of inflationary gravitational particle production in the physics of Dark Matter (DM). Large-scale DM fluctuations generated during inflation behave as gravitational particles upon their…