Related papers: Inflationary Particle Production and Implications …
We confront predictions of inflationary scenarios with the WMAP data, in combination with complementary small-scale CMB measurements and large-scale structure data. The WMAP detection of a large-angle anti-correlation in the…
We study the damping of an oscillating scalar field in a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime by perturbative processes, taking into account the finite density effects that interactions with the plasma of decay products have on the damping…
The formation of black holes inevitably affects the distribution of dark and baryonic matter in their vicinity, leading to an enhancement of the dark matter density, called spike, and if dark matter is made of WIMPs, to a strong enhancement…
Cosmic acceleration manifested in the early universe as inflation, generating primordial gravitational waves detectable in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Cosmic acceleration is occurring again at present as dark energy,…
Warm inflation is a well-motivated and generalized framework of inflation, describing a coupled inflaton-radiation bath. In this work, we investigate a warm inflation model with a quartic potential and a composite dissipation coefficient…
The recent Planck results and future releases on the horizon present a key opportunity to address a fundamental question in inflationary cosmology of whether primordial density perturbations have a quantum or thermal origin, i.e. whether…
A generic weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) is one of the most attractive candidates to account for the cold dark matter in our Universe, since it would be thermally produced with the correct abundance to account for the observed…
Rare Poisson processes (PP) during cosmic inflation can lead to signatures that are localized in position space and are not well captured by the standard two- or higher-point correlation functions of primordial density perturbations. As an…
Dark matter constitutes one of the most intriguing but so far unresolved issues in physics today. In many extensions of the Standard Model the existence of a stable Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) is predicted. The WIMP is an…
We present a new realization of the resonant production of primordial black holes as well as gravitational waves in a two-stage inflation model consisting of a scalar field \phi with an axion-monodromy-like periodic structure in the…
Measuring the primordial power spectrum on small scales is a powerful tool in inflation model building, yet constraints from Cosmic Microwave Background measurements alone are insufficient to place bounds stringent enough to be appreciably…
We recently showed that postulated ultracompact minihalos with a steep density profile do not form in realistic simulations with enhanced initial perturbations. In this paper we assume that a small fraction of the dark matter consists of…
We investigate the impact of particle production during inflation in scenarios where an infinite tower of states features a mass scale that decreases exponentially along the inflationary trajectory. Such couplings naturally arise in string…
We describe a new mechanism that gives rise to dissipation during cosmic inflation. In the simplest implementation, the mechanism requires the presence of a massive scalar field with a softly-broken global $U(1)$ symmetry, along with the…
We evaluate the prospects for finding evidence of dark matter production at the Large Hadron Collider. We consider WIMPs and superWIMPs, weakly- and superweakly-interacting massive particles, and characterize their properties through…
We review various issues related to the direct detection of constituents of dark matter, which are assumed to be Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). We specifically consider heavy WIMPs such as: 1) The lightest supersymmetric…
The running-mass inflation model, which has strong motivation from particle physics, predicts density perturbations whose spectral index is strongly scale-dependent. For a large part of parameter space the spectrum rises sharply to short…
We consider supersymmetric inflation models in which inflation occurs at an intermediate scale and which provide a solution to the $\mu$ problem and the strong CP problem. Such models are particularly attractive since inflation,…
We calculate the production of a massive vector boson by quantum fluctuations during inflation. This gives a novel dark-matter production mechanism quite distinct from misalignment or thermal production. While scalars and tensors are…
WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle), FIMP (Feebly interacting Massive Particle) and EWIP (Extremely Weakly Interacting Particle) dark matter are different theoretical frameworks that have been postulated to explain the dark matter.…