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Title: Inflatable Dark Matter

Journal Article · · Physical Review Letters
 [1];  [2];  [3]
  1. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
  2. Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
  3. C.N. Yang Inst. for Theoretical Physics, Stony Brook, NY (United States)

We describe a general scenario, dubbed “Inflatable Dark Matter”, in which the density of dark matter particles can be reduced through a short period of late-time inflation in the early universe. The overproduction of dark matter that is predicted within many otherwise well-motivated models of new physics can be elegantly remedied within this context, without the need to tune underlying parameters or to appeal to anthropic considerations. Thermal relics that would otherwise be disfavored can easily be accommodated within this class of scenarios, including dark matter candidates that are very heavy or very light. Furthermore, the non-thermal abundance of GUT or Planck scale axions can be brought to acceptable levels, without invoking anthropic tuning of initial conditions. Additionally, a period of late-time inflation could have occurred over a wide range of scales from ~ MeV to the weak scale or above, and could have been triggered by physics within a hidden sector, with small but not necessarily negligible couplings to the Standard Model.

Research Organization:
Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States); Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-07CH11359; SC0012704; FG02-13ER41958; SC00112704
OSTI ID:
1221332
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1235763; OSTI ID: 1260146
Report Number(s):
FERMILAB-PUB-15-318-A; YITP-SB-15-26; BNL-112230-2016-JA; arXiv eprint number arXiv:1507.08660
Journal Information:
Physical Review Letters, Vol. 116, Issue 3; ISSN 0031-9007
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 43 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (12)

Axion global fits with Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking before inflation using GAMBIT journal March 2019
Toward (finally!) ruling out Z and Higgs mediated dark matter models journal December 2016
When the universe expands too fast: relentless dark matter journal May 2017
Novel gamma-ray signatures of PeV-scale dark matter journal April 2018
Constraints on decaying dark matter from the isotropic gamma-ray background journal March 2019
Reconstructing non-standard cosmologies with dark matter journal October 2019
Reviving Z and Higgs mediated dark matter models in matter dominated freeze-out journal January 2020
Axion global fits with Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking before inflation using GAMBIT text January 2019
Thermal Dark Matter From A Highly Decoupled Sector text January 2016
Superheavy Thermal Dark Matter and Primordial Asymmetries text January 2017
Saturated Overburden Scattering and the Multiscatter Frontier: Discovering Dark Matter at the Planck Mass and Beyond text January 2018
Design and Implementation of the ABRACADABRA-10 cm Axion Dark Matter Search text January 2019

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