The dark matter annihilation boost from low-temperature reheating

Abstract

The evolution of the Universe between inflation and the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis is difficult to probe and largely unconstrained. This ignorance profoundly limits our understanding of dark matter: we cannot calculate its thermal relic abundance without knowing when the Universe became radiation dominated. Fortunately, small-scale density perturbations provide a probe of the early Universe that could break this degeneracy. If dark matter is a thermal relic, density perturbations that enter the horizon during an early matter-dominated era grow linearly with the scale factor prior to reheating. The resulting abundance of substructure boosts the annihilation rate by several orders of magnitude, which can compensate for the smaller annihilation cross sections that are required to generate the observed dark matter density in these scenarios. In particular, thermal relics with masses less than a TeV that thermally and kinetically decouple prior to reheating may already be ruled out by Fermi-LAT observations of dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Although these constraints are subject to uncertainties regarding the internal structure of the microhalos that form from the enhanced perturbations, they open up the possibility of using gamma-ray observations to learn about the reheating of the Universe.