Abstract
We compare dark matter production from the thermal bath in the early universe with its direct production through the decay of the inflaton. We show that even if dark matter does not possess a direct coupling with the inflaton, Standard Model loop processes may be sufficient to generate the correct relic abundance.
Highlights
Despite indirect but clear evidence [1] of the presence of a large amount of dark matter in our Universe, its nature still remains elusive
We show that even if dark matter does not possess a direct coupling with the inflaton, Standard Model loop processes may be sufficient to generate the correct relic abundance
It is useful to look for different scenarios, including those with ultraweak couplings [13], or the possibility that dark matter production occurred at very early stages of reheating after inflation as in the case of gravitino production [11,15,16]
Summary
Despite indirect but clear evidence [1] of the presence of a large amount of dark matter in our Universe, its nature still remains elusive. It is useful to look for different scenarios, including those with ultraweak couplings [13] (see [14] for a review), or the possibility that dark matter production occurred at very early stages of reheating after inflation as in the case of gravitino production [11,15,16] In this context, it has been confirmed that dark matter production is naturally feasible in a wide variety of models such as SO(10) grand unification [17], anomaly free U(1)’ models [18], spin-2 portal [19] high scale supergravity [20,21,22,23,24] or moduli portal [25].
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