Acoustically driven dark matter freeze-out

Abstract

We extend the study of the effect of density perturbations to the well known thermal dark matter freeze-out scenario. We find $\sim 10\%$ enhancements in the cross section are required to match onto the observed relic abundance for primordial curvature perturbations $\sim 0.2$ at length scales $\sim 1/$Hubble at freeze-out. Such corrections may be of importance in scenarios in which such perturbations are present and observational signals, such as the indirect detection rate, depend sensitively on the DM mass and freeze-out cross section, e.g. near resonances associated with DM bound states.

8 pages, 6 figures