The nature of dark matter and the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe are two important open puzzles in contemporary high-energy physics and cosmology. In this talk, after introducing some necessary background notions, I will present a mechanism which aims at simultaneously addressing both of these questions.
In particular, I will show that out-of-equilibrium decay or scattering processes involving exotic heavy particles in the early Universe can produce dark matter along with an asymmetry between baryons and antibaryons. I will further show that, depending on the nature of the underlying interactions, both dark matter production and baryogenesis can take place at drastically different temperatures during the cosmological evolution. The mechanism can have interesting phenomenological implications for collider observations, structure formation and, eventually, inflationary observables.
