Related papers: Thermal decoupling of WIMPs from first principles
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) continue to be considered some of the best-motivated Dark Matter (DM) candidates. No conclusive signal, despite an extensive search program that combines, often in a complementary way, direct,…
We discuss the production of dark matter with mass of order $10$-$100$ TeV and $\mathcal{O}(1)$ couplings to the standard model, a scenario we refer to as the `mesotuned WIMP'. Given the lack of new physics observed at the LHC, indicating…
A weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) is a leading candidate of the dark matter. The WIMP dark matter abundance is determined by the freeze-out mechanism. Once we know the property of the WIMP particle such as the mass and…
We present a general expression for the values of the average kinetic energy and of the temperature of kinetic decoupling of a WIMP, valid for any cosmological model. We show an example of the usage of our solution when the Hubble rate has…
WIMPs, weakly-interacting massive particles, have been leading candidates for particle dark matter for decades, and they remain a viable and highly motivated possibility. In these lectures, I describe the basic motivations for WIMPs,…
WIMPs with electroweak scale masses (neutralinos, etc.) remain in kinetic equilibrium with other particle species until temperatures approximately in the range of 10 MeV to 1 GeV, leading to the formation of dark matter substructure with…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. Currently, the most promising method to detect WIMPs is the direct detection of the recoil energy deposited in a low-background laboratory…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. We develop a model-independent method for determining the mass $m_\chi$ of the WIMP by using data (i.e., measured recoil energies) of direct…
We demonstrate that in a two component dark matter (DM) set up, when DM$_1$ is equilibrated with the thermal bath, the other DM$_2$, in spite of having feeble or negligible interaction with the SM particles, can be brought to equilibrium…
Many experiments exploring weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) such as direct, indirect and collider searches have been carried out until now. However, a clear signal of a WIMP has not been found yet and it makes us to suspect that…
Astrophysical observations indicate that about 23% of the energy density of the universe is in the form of non-baryonic particles beyond the standard model of particle physics. One exciting and well motivated candidate is the lightest…
Dark Matter (DM) is generally assumed to be massive, cold and collisionless from the structure formation point of view. A more correct statement however is that DM indeed experiences collisional damping, but on a scale which is supposed to…
A thermal relic, often referred to as a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), is a particle produced during the early evolution of the Universe whose present (relic) abundance depends only on its mass and its thermally averaged…
Visinelli and Gondolo (2015, hereafter VG15) derived analytic expressions for the evolution of the dark matter temperature in a generic cosmological model. They then calculated the dark matter kinetic decoupling temperature…
We investigate a new class of dark matter: superweakly-interacting massive particles (superWIMPs). As with conventional WIMPs, superWIMPs appear in well-motivated particle theories with naturally the correct relic density. In contrast to…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. So far we can use direct Dark Matter detection to estimate the mass of halo WIMPs only by fitting predicted recoil spectra to future…
Current cosmological models and data suggest the existence of a cold Dark Matter (DM) component, however the nature of DM particles remains unknown. A favored candidate for DM is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) in the mass…
Model-independent theoretical upper bound on the thermal dark matter (DM) mass can be derived from the maximum inelastic DM cross-section featuring the whole observed DM abundance. We deploy partial-wave unitarity of the scattering matrix…
We consider two non-standard cosmological scenaria according to which the universe is reheated to a low reheating temperature after the late decay of a scalar field or is dominated by the kinetic energy of a quintessence field in the…
Warm dark matter cosmologies have been widely studied as an alternative to the cold dark matter paradigm, the characteristic feature being a suppression of structure formation on small cosmological scales. A very similar situation occurs if…