Related papers: Adagio for Thermal Relics
Though some LHC searches for new physics exceed the TeV scale, there may be discoveries waiting to be made at much lower masses. We outline a simple quirk model, motivated by models that address the hierarchy problem through neutral…
Despite the success of Maxwell's electromagnetism in the description of the electromagnetic interactions on small scales, we know very little about the behaviour of electromagnetic fields on cosmological distances. Thus, it has been…
We present up to date cosmological bounds on the sum of active neutrino masses as well as on extended cosmological scenarios with additional thermal relics, as thermal axions or sterile neutrino species. Our analyses consider all the…
The consideration of dark energy's quanta, required also by thermodynamics, introduces its chemical potential into the cosmological equations. Isolating its main contribution, we obtain solutions with dark energy decaying to matter or…
The simplest cosmologies motivate the consideration of dark matter subcomponents that interact significantly with normal matter. Moreover, such strongly-coupled relics may have evaded detection to date if upon encountering the Earth they…
We consider a light scalar dark matter candidate with mass in the GeV range whose $p$-wave annihilation is enhanced through a Breit-Wigner resonance. The annihilation actually proceeds in the $s$-channel via a dark photon mediator whose…
Precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum are in excellent agreement with the predictions of the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model. However, there is some tension between the value of the Hubble…
An intriguing possibility that can address pathologies in both early universe cosmology (i.e. the horizon problem) and quantum gravity (i.e. non-renormalizability), is that particles at very high energies and/or temperatures could propagate…
Absent any indirect tests on the thermal history of the Universe prior to the formation of light nuclear elements, it is legitimate to investigate situations where, before nucleosyntheis, the sound speed of the plasma was larger than…
The Swampland program, which looks for low energy theories consistent with quantum gravity, has led to the introduction of a dark dimension stemming from the cosmological constant. We show that the same argument leads to the emergence of…
Thermal relic dark matter below $\sim 10 \ \text{GeV}$ is excluded by cosmic microwave background data if its annihilation to visible particles is unsuppressed near the epoch of recombination. Usual model-building measures to avoid this…
We investigate potential constraints from cosmic shear on the dark matter particle mass, assuming all dark matter is made up of light thermal relic particles. Given the theoretical uncertainties involved in making cosmological predictions…
If supersymmetry exists at any scale, regardless of whether it is restored around the weak scale, it may be a good symmetry of the dark sector, enforcing a degeneracy between its lowest lying fermions and bosons. We explore the implications…
Since the thermal history of the Universe is unknown before the epoch of primordial nucleosynthesis, the largest temperature of the radiation dominated phase (the reheating temperature) might have been as low as 1 MeV. We perform a…
In models with large extra dimensions, where the fundamental gravity scale can be in the electroweak range, gravitational effects in particle physics may be noticeable even at relatively low energies. In this paper, we perform simple…
We present a study of the decay of an intermediate mini black hole at the first impact of a cosmic ray particle with the atmosphere, in the context of D-brane world scenarios with TeV scale gravity and large extra dimensions. We model the…
Dark matter with Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation has been proposed to explain observed cosmic ray positron excesses in the 10 GeV to TeV energy range. We show that the required enhancement implies thermal relic densities that are too small…
Low energy antideuteron detection presents a unique channel for indirect detection, targeting dark matter that annihilates into hadrons in a relatively background-free way. Since the idea was first proposed, many WIMP-type models have…
The fundamental problem of how tunneling in thermal medium is completed is addressed, and a new time scale of order 1/friction for its termination, which is usually much shorter than the Hubble time, is pointed out. Enhanced non-linear…
We show that relaxion, that addresses the hierarchy problem, can account for the observed dark matter (DM) relic density. The setup is similar to the case of axion DM models topped with a dynamical misalignment mechanism. After the…