Related papers: Massive Particle Decay and Cold Dark Matter Abunda…
We study the effect of the elastic scattering on the non-thermal WIMP, which is produced by direct decay of heavy particles at the end of reheating. The non-thermal WIMP becomes important when the reheating temperature is well below the…
A solution to the Boltzmann equation governing the thermal relic abundance of cold dark matter is constructed by matched asymptotic approximations. The approximation of the relic density is an asymptotic series valid when the abundance does…
We study a nonstandard dark-matter thermal history in which strong self-interactions give rise to collective many-body effects at high number density, as in strongly interacting quantum media. At early times, dark matter occupies a…
Dark matter (DM) as a thermal relic of the primordial plasma is increasingly pressured by direct and indirect searches, while the same production mechanism in a decoupled sector is much less constrained. We extend the standard treatment of…
If the early universe is dominated by an energy density which evolves other than radiation-like the normal Hubble-temperature relation $H\propto T^2$ is broken and dark matter relic density calculations in this era can be significantly…
If dark matter (DM) is a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that is a thermal relic of the early Universe, then its total self-annihilation cross section is revealed by its present-day mass density. The canonical thermally averaged…
Thermal freeze-out is a compelling framework for naturally generating the dark matter abundance. We systematically study a broad range of dark matter and mediator particle combinations that can viably realize thermal freeze-out, focusing on…
We find new and universal relations for the properties of dark matter particles consistent with standard relic abundances. Analysis is based on first characterizing the $s$-channel resonant annihilation process in great detail, keeping…
The evolution of the Universe between inflation and the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis is difficult to probe and largely unconstrained. This ignorance profoundly limits our understanding of dark matter: we cannot calculate its thermal…
We investigate the relic density n_\chi of non-relativistic long-lived or stable particles \chi in cosmological scenarios in which the temperature T is too low for \chi to achieve full chemical equilibrium. The case with a heavier particle…
We consider the production of dark matter during the process of reheating after inflation. The relic density of dark matter from freeze-in depends on both the energy density and energy distribution of the inflaton scattering or decay…
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…
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 show that the relic abundance of the minority component of asymmetric dark matter can be very sensitive to the expansion rate of the Universe and the temperature of transition between a non-standard pre-Big Bang Nucleosynthesis…
We propose that the dark matter abundance is set by the decoupling of inelastic scattering instead of annihilations. This coscattering mechanism is generically realized if dark matter scatters against states of comparable mass from the…
Non-thermal dark matter generation is an appealing alternative to the standard paradigm of thermal WIMP dark matter. We reconsider non-thermal production mechanisms in a systematic way, and develop a numerical code for accurate computations…
In the standard thermal relic scenario, dark matter remains in chemical equilibrium with the Standard Model radiation bath until freeze-out occurs at $T \sim m_X/20$, where $m_X$ is the dark matter mass. In this familiar class of models,…
We present a novel dark matter candidate, an Elastically Decoupling Relic (ELDER), which is a cold thermal relic whose present abundance is determined by the cross-section of its elastic scattering on Standard Model particles. The dark…
We consider a model of dark matter where the mediator corresponds to a superposition of a scalar and pseudoscalar, and the scenario where, after reheating, the number densities of the dark sector particles, i.e. the dark matter and the…
We present a new dark matter candidate, the `inELastically DEcoupling Relic' (iELDER), which is a cold thermal relic whose abundance is determined by the freeze out of its inelastic scattering off of bath particles in the presence of…