Related papers: WIMPs Without Weakness: Generalized Mass Window wi…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are among the best-motivated dark matter candidates. In the standard scenario where the freeze-out occurs well after the end of inflationary reheating, they are in tension with the severe…
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…
We summarize here our studies \cite{Chu:2022xuh,Chu:2023jyb,Chu:2024rrv} on two distinct scenarios for MeV-mass thermal dark matter freeze-out. First, we determine the minimal viable mass for dark matter below tens of MeV, considering…
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…
If the interaction rates between the visible and the dark sectors were never strong enough, the observed dark matter relic abundance could have been produced in the early Universe by non-thermal processes. This is what occurs in the…
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,…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) have long reigned as one of the leading classes of dark matter candidates. The observed dark matter abundance can be naturally obtained by freezeout of weak-scale dark matter annihilations in the…
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…
In existing dark matter models with global symmetries the relic abundance of dark matter is either equal to that of anti-dark matter (thermal WIMP), or vastly larger, with essentially no remaining anti-dark matter (asymmetric dark matter).…
The combination of S-matrix unitarity and the dynamics of thermal freeze-out for massive relic particles (denoted here simply by WIMPs) implies a lower limit on the density of such particles, that provide a (potentially sub-dominant)…
The 'WIMP miracle' for the relic abundance of thermal dark matter motivates weak scale dark matter with renormalizable couplings to standard model particles. We study minimal models with such couplings that explain dark matter as a thermal…
There are several ways to explain the dark matter relic density other than by the ordinary freeze-out scenario. For example, the freeze-in mechanism may constitute an alternative for generating the correct relic density for dark matter…
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…
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 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…
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…
We describe the evolution of Dark Matter (DM) abundance from the very onset of its creation from inflaton decay under the assumption of an instantaneous reheating. Based on the initial conditions such as the inflaton mass and its decay…
The nature of dark matter (DM) remains one of the most important unanswered questions in particle physics. Here, we propose a novel scenario for DM in which weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) can freeze-in due to a first-order…
We study the effect of the elastic scattering on the non-thermal WIMP, which is produced by direct decay of heavy particles at the end of reheating. The non-thermal WIMP becomes important when the reheating temperature is well below the…
In the standard thermal relic scenario, dark matter remains in chemical equilibrium with the Standard Model radiation bath until freeze-out occurs at $T \sim m_X/20$, where $m_X$ is the dark matter mass. In this familiar class of models,…