We compare dark matter production from the thermal bath in the early universe with its direct production through the decay of the inflaton. We show that even if dark matter does not possess a direct coupling with the inflaton, Standard Model loop processes may be sufficient to generate the correct relic abundance.
We perform a comprehensive study of models of dark matter (DM) in a Universe with a non-thermal cosmological history, i.e with a phase of pressure-less matter domination before the onset of big-bang nucleosynethesis (BBN). Such cosmological histories
are generically predicted by UV completions that contain gravitationally coupled scalar fields (moduli). We classify the different production mechanisms for DM in this framework, generalizing previous works by considering a wide range of DM masses/couplings and allowing for DM to be in equilibrium with a dark sector. We identify four distinct parametric regimes for the production of relic DM, and derive accurate semi-analytic approximations for the DM relic abundance. Our results are particularly relevant for supersymmetric theories, in which the standard non-thermally produced DM candidates are disfavored by indirect detection constraints. We also comment on experimental signals in this framework, focusing on novel effects involving the power spectrum of DM density perturbations. In particular, we identify a class of models where the spectrum of DM density perturbations is sensitive to the pressure-less matter dominated era before BBN, giving rise to interesting astrophysical signatures to be looked for in the future. A worthwhile future direction would be to study well-motivated theoretical models within this framework and carry out detailed studies of the pattern of expected experimental signals.
We consider the production of right-handed (RH) sneutrino dark matter in a model of Dirac neutrino where neutrino Yukawa coupling constants are very small. Dark matter RH sneutrinos are produced by scatterings and decays of thermal particles in the e
arly Universe without reaching thermal equilibrium due to the small Yukawa couplings. We show that not only decays of thermal particles but also the thermal scatterings can be a dominant source as well as non-thermal production in a scenario with light sneutrinos and charged sleptons while other supersymmetric particles are heavy. We also discuss the cosmological implications of this scenario.
The singlet majoron model of seesaw neutrino mass is appended by one dark Majorana fermion singlet $chi$ with $L=2$ and one dark complex scalar singlet $zeta$ with $L=1$. This simple setup allows $chi$ to obtain a small radiative mass anchored by the
same heavy right-handed neutrinos, whereas the one-loop decay of the standard-model Higgs boson to $chi chi + bar{chi} bar{chi}$ provides the freeze-in mechanism for $chi$ to be the light dark matter of the Universe.
We carry out a detailed study of the confinement phase transition in a dark sector with a $SU(N)$ gauge group and a single generation of dark heavy quark. We focus on heavy enough quarks such that their abundance freezes out before the phase transiti
on and the phase transition is of first-order. We find that during this phase transition the quarks are trapped inside contracting pockets of the deconfined phase and are compressed enough to interact at a significant rate, giving rise to a second stage of annihilation that can dramatically change the resulting dark matter abundance. As a result, the dark matter can be heavier than the often-quoted unitarity bound of $sim100~$TeV. Our findings are almost completely independent of the details of the portal between the dark sector and the Standard Model. We comment briefly on possible signals of such a sector. Our main findings are summarized in a companion letter, while here we provide further details on different parts of the calculation.
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 $k geq 2$, taking pl
ace either entirely within the dark sector, or involving standard model fields. This translates to a maximum mass of the particle saturating the observed DM abundance, which, for dominantly $s$-wave annihilations, is obtained to be around $130$ TeV, $1$ GeV, $7$ MeV and $110$ keV, for $k=2,3,4$ and $5$, respectively, in a radiation dominated Universe, for a real or complex scalar DM stabilized by a minimal symmetry. For modified thermal histories in the pre-big bang nucleosynthesis era, with an intermediate period of matter domination, values of reheating temperature higher than $mathcal{O}(200)$ GeV for $k geq 4$, $mathcal{O}(1)$ TeV for $k=3$ and $mathcal{O}(50)$ TeV for $k=2$ are strongly disfavoured by the combined requirements of unitarity and DM relic abundance, for DM freeze-out before reheating.