Abstract
We study a novel proposal for the origin of cosmological cold dark matter (CDM) which is rooted in the quantum nature of spacetime. In this model, off-shell modes of quantum fields can exist in asymptotic states as a result of spacetime nonlocality (expected in generic theories of quantum gravity) and play the role of CDM, which we dub off-shell dark matter (). However, their rate of production is suppressed by the scale of nonlocality (e.g. Planck length). As a result, we show that is only produced in the first moments of big bang, and then effectively decouples (except through its gravitational interactions). We examine the observational predictions of this model: In the context of cosmic inflation, we show that this proposal relates the reheating temperature to the inflaton mass, which narrows down the uncertainty in the number of -foldings of specific inflationary scenarios. We also demonstrate that is indeed cold, and discuss potentially observable signatures on small scale matter power spectrum.
- Received 21 November 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.043514
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