Weekly seminars

Out-of-equilibrium production of dark matter in the early universe

par M. Torsten Bringmann (Oslo University)

Europe/Paris
Petit Amphi (LAPTh)

Petit Amphi

LAPTh

9, chemin de Bellevue 74940 ANNECY
Description
Dark matter is an essential ingredient of the standard model of cosmology. 
Any theory describing it in terms of hypothetical new particles must therefore 
include a production mechanism that can explain its present abundance, with 
an accuracy matching cosmological observations.  In this talk I will describe 
two generic ways of how dark matter with even very feeble interactions can be 
produced from the primordial thermal bath of standard model particles. The 
first example is commonly known as 'freeze-in' production, where I will report 
on recent updates that facilitate precision calculations of the relic density 
in particular in Higgs portal models. I will then introduce a newly proposed 
alternative production scenario that is characterized by an era of exponential 
('pandemic') growth of the dark matter density in the early universe. As a 
concrete application, I demonstrate how this idea opens up highly relevant 
-- and relatively shortly testable -- new parameter space for sterile neutrino 
dark matter.