String theory and the dark glueball problem

Abstract

We study cosmological constraints on dark pure Yang-Mills sectors. Dark glueballs are overproduced for large regions of ultraviolet parameter space. The problem may be alleviated in two ways: via a large preferential reheating into the visible sector, motivating certain inflation or modulus decay models, or via decays into axions or moduli, which are strongly constrained by nucleosynthesis and $\Delta N_{\text{eff}}$ bounds. String models frequently have multiple hidden Yang-Mills sectors, which are subject to even stronger constraints due to the existence of multiple dark glueballs.