Boosting Freeze-in through Thermalization

Abstract

If the interaction rates between the visible and the dark sectors were never strong enough, the observed dark matter relic abundance could have been produced in the early Universe by non-thermal processes. This is what occurs in the so-called freeze-in mechanism. In the simplest version of the freeze-in paradigm, after dark matter is produced from the standard model thermal bath, its abundance is frozen and remains constant. However, thermalization and number-changing processes in the dark sector can have strong impacts, in particular enhancing the dark matter relic abundance by several orders of magnitude. Here we show that this enhancement can be computed from general arguments as the conservation of energy and entropy, independently from the underlying particle physics details of the dark sector. We also note that this result is quite general, and applies to FIMP production independently of being UV- or IR-dominated.

10 pages, 2 figures. V2 matches the version published in JCAP

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Cited by in corpus (20)

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• Boltzmann or Bogoliubov? Approaches Compared in Gravitational Particle Production
• Freeze-in from Preheating
• From WIMPs to FIMPs with Low Reheating Temperatures
• Dark Matter and Leptogenesis from Gravitational Production
• Gauged Inverse Seesaw from Dark Matter
• Disformal Dark Matter
• Dark Matter from Exponential Growth
• Non-minimally Coupled Vector Boson Dark Matter
• Dark matter freeze-in from semi-production
• From WIMPs to FIMPs: Impact of Early Matter Domination
• FIMP Dark Matter in Clockwork/Linear Dilaton Extra-Dimensions
• Non-Oscillatory No-Scale Inflation
• Phenomenological and cosmological implications of a scotogenic three-loop neutrino mass model
• Probing displaced (dark)photons from low reheating freeze-in at the LHC
• Freezing-in Cannibal Dark Sectors
• Gravitational SIMPs