Dark Matter Abundance from Sequential Freeze-in Mechanism

Abstract

We present a thorough analysis of the sequential freeze-in mechanism for dark matter production in the early universe. In this mechanism the dark matter relic density results from pair annihilation of mediator particles which are themselves produced by thermal collisions of standard model particles. Below some critical value of the mediator coupling to standard model fields, this sequential channel dominates over the usual freeze-in where dark matter is directly produced from thermal collisions, even when the mediator is not in thermal equilibrium. The latter case requires computing the full non-thermal distribution of the mediators, for which finite temperature corrections are particularly important.

14 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Too big to fail? The puzzling darkness of massive Milky Way subhaloes
• The Dawn of FIMP Dark Matter: A Review of Models and Constraints
• Light Dark Matter: Models and Constraints
• Making dark matter out of light: freeze-in from plasma effects
• Singlet fermionic dark matter
• Cosmological Constraints on Very Dark Photons
• Dark Sectors 2016 Workshop: Community Report
• Probing the scotogenic FIMP at the LHC
• Heavy stable charged tracks as signatures of non-thermal dark matter at the LHC : a study in some non-supersymmetric scenarios
• A Gauge-Invariant Reorganization of Thermal Gauge Theory