Related papers: Adagio for Thermal Relics
It has been suggested that the weak magnetic field hosted by the intergalactic medium in cosmic voids could be a relic from the early Universe. However, accepted models of turbulent magnetohydrodynamic decay predict that the present-day…
We discuss the astrophysical and cosmological implications of having primordial thermal 2-2-hole remnants as dark matter. Thermal 2-2-holes emanate in quadratic gravity as horizonless classical solutions for ultracompact distributions of…
The value of Hubble constant inferred from Planck measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background is at $4.4\sigma$ tension with direct astronomical measurements at low redshifts. Very recently, it has been conjectured that…
We discuss a class of theories that predict a fermionic dark matter candidate from gauge anomaly cancellation. As an explicit example, we study the predictions in theories where the global symmetry associated with baryon number is promoted…
The matching of our epoch of existence with the approximate equality of dark energy and dark matter energy densities is an apparent further fine-tuning, beyond the already troubling 120 orders of magnitude that separate dark energy from the…
Measurements of the primordial element abundances provide us with an important probe of our universe's early thermal history, allowing us to constrain the expansion rate and composition of our universe as early as $\sim 1 \, {\rm s}$ after…
The origin of dark matter as a thermal relic offers a compelling way in which the early universe was initially populated by dark matter. Alternative explanations typically appear exotic compared to the simplicity of thermal production.…
Accepting the fine tuned cosmological constant hypothesis, we have recently proposed that this hypothesis can be tested if the dark matter freeze out occurs at the electroweak scale and if one were to measure an anomalous shift in the dark…
Axions currently provide the most compelling solution to the strong CP problem. These particles may be copiously produced in the early universe, including via thermal processes. Therefore, relic axions constitute a hot dark matter component…
Very recently, it was pointed out that when basic ideas of the Swampland program are combined with the cosmological hierarchy problem (i.e. the smallness of the dark energy in Planck units) and together are confronted to experiment lead to…
Motivated by the stability of the electroweak Higgs vacuum we consider the possibility that the Standard Model might work up to large scales between about $10^{10}$ GeV and close to the Planck scale. A plausible scenario is an emergent…
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…
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,…
If the inflationary phase lasted longer than the minimal period, the length scales observed today originate from modes that were smaller than the Planck length during inflation. It was recently argued that this "trans-Planckian problem" can…
We investigate the thermal relic density of a cold dark matter in the brane world cosmology. Since the expansion law in a high energy regime is modified from the one in the standard cosmology, if the dark matter decouples in such a high…
We investigate the joint effect of the cosmological phase transitions, thermal light dark matter, and the lepton asymmetry on the big bang nucleosynthesis and cosmic microwave background. We find that all of them can modify the predictions…
We discuss possible ways to observationally detect the superdense cosmic objects composed of hypothetical sub-constituent fermions beneath the quark/lepton level, recently proposed by us. The characteristic mass and size of such objects…
Within the framework of the extra-dimensional Randall-Sundrum set-up, we investigate the freeze-in production of Standard Model (SM) gauge-singlet scalar, fermionic, and massive vector dark matter (DM). Assuming that both the DM and SM…
We present a classically scale-invariant model with a confining dark sector, which is coupled to the Standard Model through the Higgs portal. The galactic centre gamma ray excess can be explained in this model by collision-induced dark…
The presence of light thermally coupled dark matter affects early expansion history and production of light elements during the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Specifically, dark matter that annihilates into Standard Model particles can modify…