Related papers: Dark matter from inflationary quantum fluctuations
We study the stochastic background of gravitational waves which accompany the sudden freeze-out of dark matter triggered by a cosmological first order phase transition that endows dark matter with mass. We consider models that produce the…
Dark matter and cosmic inflation represent two of the major puzzles in cosmology. They are typically addressed by introducing separate fields with independent dynamics. On the other hand, extra dimensions might play an important role for…
We discuss the possibility of producing a light dark photon dark matter through a coupling between the dark photon field and the inflaton. The dark photon with a large wavelength is efficiently produced due to the inflaton motion during…
One contribution to any dark sector's abundance comes from its gravitational production during inflation. If the dark sector is weakly coupled to the inflaton and the Standard Model, this can be its only production mechanism. For…
The growth of adiabatic density perturbations during an era of early matter domination induces $\mathcal{O}(1)$ fluctuations in pre-inflationary QCD axion dark matter across a broad, string-theory-motivated parameter space. Remarkably, at…
The nature of the cosmological dark matter remains elusive. Recent studies have advocated the possibility that dark matter could be composed of ultra-light, self-interacting bosons, forming a Bose-Einstein condensate in the very early…
The scale--independence of the primordial curvature perturbation suggests that it comes from the vacuum fluctuation during inflation of a light scalar field. This field may be the inflaton, or a different `curvaton' field. The observation…
The possibility of thermally induced initial density perturbations in inflationary cosmology is examined. The fluctuation dynamics of a scalar field plus thermal bath system during slow roll is described by a Langevin-like equation.…
Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of our Universe. It is spatially flat; accelerating; comprised of 1/3 a new form of matter, 2/3 a new form of energy, with some ordinary matter and a dash of massive neutrinos;…
We propose a simple mechanism of light dark matter (DM) production from the decay of the oscillating inflaton condensation. If the reheating temperature after inflation is higher than the inflaton mass, which is of the same order of the…
We consider the possibility that massive primordial black holes are the dominant form of dark matter. Black hole formation generates entropy fluctuations that adds a Poisson noise to the matter power spectrum. We use Lyman-alpha forest…
We present a minimal UV complete framework to embed inflation and dark matter by extending the standard model with a singlet real scalar field (the inflaton) and a singlet fermonic field acting as dark matter. The inflaton features the most…
A kinetic mixing between the axion and the inflaton allows for a production of axion dark matter even if the inflationary Hubble scale is smaller than the zero-temperature axion mass. We analyze the axion dynamics in this recently…
We generalize a recently proposed mechanism for the origin of primordial metric perturbations in inflationary models. Quantum fluctuations of light scalar fields during inflation give rise to super-horizon fluctuations of masses and…
We outline a fundamentally quantum description of bosonic dark matter (DM) from which the conventional classical-wave picture emerges in the limit $m \ll 10~\textrm{eV}$. As appropriate for a quantum system, we start from the density matrix…
We examine from first principles one of the basic assumptions of modern quantum theories of structure formation in the early universe, i.e., the conditions upon which fluctuations of a quantum field may transmute into classical stochastic…
We propose a novel enhancement mechanism of the curvature perturbations in the nonminimal derivative coupling inflation model with a coupling parameter related to the inflaton field. By considering a special form of the coupling parameter…
We present new single field inflationary scenarios that produce the critical abundance of primordial black holes as dark matter reconstructing the inflaton potential from an input power spectrum. The method is exact in the slow roll…
It is shown, using quantum field theory in curved spacetime, how the expansion of the universe during inflation produces an aggregate of particles and inflaton vacuum fluctuations at a temperature of 5x10^17GeV and dense enough to make…
Recent cosmological observations indicate the existence of extra light species, i.e., dark radiation. In this paper we show that signatures of the dark radiation are imprinted in the spectrum of inflationary gravitational waves. If the dark…