Related papers: Big Bang initial conditions and self-interacting h…
We consider a scenario where the inflaton decays to a hidden sector thermally decoupled from the visible Standard Model sector. A tiny portal coupling between the hidden and the visible sectors later heats the visible sector so that the…
We consider a dark sector model containing stable fermions charged under an unbroken $U(1)$ gauge interaction, with a massless dark photon as force carrier, and interacting with ordinary matter via scalar messengers. We study its early…
We extend previous studies of big bang nucleosynthesis, with the assumption that ordinary matter and dark matter sectors are entangled through the number of degrees of freedom entering the Friedmann equations. This conjecture allows us to…
All of the significant evidence for dark matter observed thus far has been through its gravitational interactions. After 40 years of direct detection experiments, the parameter space for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) as dark…
Cosmological observations have revealed the existence of a dark matter sector, which is commonly assumed to be made up of one particle species only. However, this sector might be more complicated than we currently believe: there might be…
We study models in which the inflaton is coupled to two otherwise decoupled sectors, and the effect of preheating and related processes on their energy densities during the evolution of the universe. Over most of parameter space, preheating…
The initial density of dark matter (DM) particles, otherwise secluded from the standard model (SM), may be generated at reheating, with an initial temperature ratio for internal thermalizations, $\xi_i=T_{\rm DM,i}/T_{\rm SM,i}$. This…
Self-Interacting Dark Matter models can successfully explain dark matter (DM) production through interactions confined within the dark sector. However, they often lack measurable experimental signals due to their secluded nature. Including…
The existence of dark matter particles that carry phenomenologically relevant self-interaction cross sections mediated by light dark sector states is considered to be severely constrained through a combination of experimental and…
We consider theories where dark matter is composed of a thermal relic of weak scale mass, whose couplings to the Standard Model (SM) are however too small to give rise to the observed abundance. Instead, the abundance is set by annihilation…
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…
The two dark sectors of the universe - dark matter and dark energy - may interact with each other. Background and linear density perturbation evolution equations are developed for a generic coupling. We then establish the general conditions…
The recent analysis from the SH0ES Collaboration has confirmed the existence of a Hubble tension between measurements at high redshift ($z> 1000$) and at low redshift ($z<1$) at the $5\sigma$ level with the low redshift measurement giving a…
We consider a cosmological model with an interaction between dark matter and dark energy which leaves the background cosmology unaffected and only affects the evolution of the perturbations. This is achieved by introducing a coupling given…
A variety of supergravity and string based models contain hidden sectors which can play a role in particle physics phenomena and in cosmology. In this note we discuss the possibility that the visible sector and the hidden sectors in general…
A number of experimental anomalies involving neutrinos hint towards the existence of at least an extra (a very light) sterile neutrino. However, such a species, appreciably mixing with the active neutrinos, is disfavored by different…
In a popular class of models, dark matter comprises an asymmetric population of composite particles with short range interactions arising from a confined nonabelian gauge group. We show that coupling this sector to a well-motivated light…
Dark matter may be coupled to dark radiation: light degrees of freedom that mediate forces between dark sector particles. Cosmological constraints favor dark radiation that is colder than Standard Model radiation. In models with fixed…
The prediction of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature and tensor fluctuations is among the main features of cosmic inflation. The current measurements of the primordial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
We study the atomic physics and the astrophysical implications of a model in which the dark matter is the analog of hydrogen in a secluded sector. The self interactions between dark matter particles include both elastic scatterings as well…