Post-inflationary dark matter bremsstrahlung

Abstract

Dark matter may only interact with the visible sector efficiently at energy scales above the inflaton mass, such as the Planck scale or the grand unification scale. In such a scenario, the dark matter is mainly produced out of equilibrium during the period of reheating, often referred to as UV freeze-in. We evaluate the abundance of the dark matter generated from bremsstrahlung off the inflaton decay products assuming no direct coupling between the inflaton and the dark matter. This process generally dominates the production of dark matter for low reheating temperatures where the production through the annihilations of particle in the thermal plasma becomes inefficient. We find that the bremsstrahlung process dominates for reheating temperatures T RH ≲ 1010 GeV, and produces the requisite density of dark matter for a UV scale ≃ 1016 GeV. As examples, we calculate numerically the yield of the dark matter bremsstrahlung through gravitation and dimension-6 vector portal effective interactions.