Abstract
Thermal freeze-out or freeze-in during a period of early matter domination can give rise to the correct dark matter abundance for . In the standard scenario, a single field that behaves like matter drives the early matter dominated era. However, in realistic models, this epoch may involve more than one field. In this paper, we study the effect of such a modification on the production of dark matter during early matter domination. We show that even a subdominant second field that decays much faster than the dominant one can considerably enhance the temperature of the Universe during an early matter-dominated phase. This in turn affects dark matter production via freeze-out/in and opens up the allowed parameter space toward significantly larger dark matter masses. As a result, one can comfortably obtain the correct relic abundance for PeV-scale dark matter for reheating temperatures at or below 10 GeV.
- Received 8 January 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.083517
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society