Related papers: Massive Particle Decay and Cold Dark Matter Abunda…
The Cold Dark Matter paradigm successfully explains many phenomena on scales larger than galaxies, but seems to predict galaxy halos which are more centrally concentrated and have a lumpier substructure than observed. Endowing cosmic dark…
Dark matter may be a thermal relic whose abundance is set by mutual annihilations among multiple species. Traditionally, this coannihilation scenario has been applied to weak scale dark matter that is highly degenerate with other states. We…
The early universe could feature multiple reheating events, leading to jumps in the visible sector entropy density that dilute both particle asymmetries and the number density of frozen-out states. In fact, late time entropy jumps are…
What is the upper limit of the mass of the neutralino dark matter whose thermal relic is consistent with the observation? If the neutralino dark matter and colored sparticles are extremely degenerated in mass, with a mass difference less…
Models in which the dark matter is produced at extremely low rates from the annihilation of Standard Model particles in the early Universe allow us to explain the current dark matter relic density while easily evading the traditional…
We study the effects of modifying the expansions history of the Universe on Dark Matter freezeout. We derived a modified Boltzmann equation for freeze-out for an arbitrary energy density in the early Universe and provide an analytic…
Many models possess unwanted relics, which should be diluted by entropy production just before the big-bang nucleosynthesis. A field responsible for the entropy production may produce stable weakly interacting massive particles, if…
Using the upper bound on the inelastic reaction cross-section implied by S-matrix unitarity, we derive the thermally averaged maximum dark matter (DM) annihilation rate for general $k \rightarrow 2$ number-changing reactions, with $k \geq…
Models with a tiny coupling $\lambda$ between the dark matter and the Standard Model, $\lambda \sim v/M_\text{Pl}\sim 10^{-16}$, can yield the measured relic abundance through the thermal process known as freeze-in. We propose to interpret…
We highlight the general scenario of dark matter freeze-out whilst the energy density of the universe is dominated by a decoupled non-relativistic species. Decoupling during matter domination changes the freeze-out dynamics, since the…
If cold dark matter consists of particles, these must be non-interacting and non-relativistic by definition. In most cold dark matter models however, dark matter particles inherit a non-vanishing velocity dispersion from interactions in the…
In models of Asymmetric Dark Matter (ADM) the relic density is set by a particle asymmetry in an analogous manner to the baryons. Here we explore the scenario in which ADM decouples from the Standard Model thermal bath during an early…
We introduce DRAKE, a numerical precision tool for predicting the dark matter relic abundance also in situations where the standard assumption of kinetic equilibrium during the freeze-out process may not be satisfied. DRAKE comes with a set…
We study the thermodynamic history of composite Dark Matter models. We start with classifying the models by means of the symmetries partially protecting the composite Dark Matter decays and constrain their lifetimes. For each model, we…
We discuss the relic abundance of asymmetric Dark Matter particles in modified cosmological scenarios where the Hubble rate is changed with respect to the standard cosmological scenario. The modified Hubble rate leaves its imprint on the…
In this letter, we consider a class of scenarios in which the dark matter is part of a heavy hidden sector that is thermally decoupled from the Standard Model in the early universe. The dark matter freezes-out by annihilating to a lighter,…
Limits on the "thermal relic" warm dark matter mass are apparently inconsistent with measurements of the warm dark matter temperature-to-mass ratio. We try to understand this problem.
We propose a novel scenario to obtain the correct relic abundance for thermally under-produced dark matter. This scenario utilizes a strongly first-order phase transition at temperature $T_{\rm PT}$ that gives rise to dark matter mass $m$.…
Pair annihilation of heavy stable particles that occurs in the early universe is reconsidered including the off-shell effect not properly taken into account by the conventional Boltzmann equation approach. Our new calculation of the time…
We study a novel dark matter production mechanism based on the freeze-in through semi-production, i.e. the inverse semi-annihilation processes. A peculiar feature of this scenario is that the production rate is suppressed by a small initial…