Dynamical Dark Matter from Thermal Freeze-Out

TL;DR

This paper extends the Dynamical Dark Matter framework by modifying thermal freeze-out processes to produce inverse mass-abundance scaling, enabling a broader range of dark matter phenomenologies.

Contribution

It introduces simple modifications to thermal freeze-out that invert the typical abundance-mass relation, expanding the DDM framework into the thermal production domain.

Findings

Modified freeze-out mechanisms produce inverse mass-abundance scaling.

Broader variety of scaling relations between lifetimes, abundances, and masses.

Enables design of dark matter ensembles with diverse phenomenologies.

Abstract

In the Dynamical Dark Matter (DDM) framework, the dark sector comprises a large number of constituent dark particles whose individual masses, lifetimes, and cosmological abundances obey specific scaling relations with respect to each other. In particular, the most natural versions of this framework tend to require a spectrum of cosmological abundances which scale inversely with mass, so that dark-sector states with larger masses have smaller abundances. Thus far, DDM model-building has primarily relied on non-thermal mechanisms for abundance generation such as misalignment production, since these mechanisms give rise to abundances that have this property. By contrast, the simplest versions of thermal freeze-out tend to produce abundances that increase, rather than decrease, with the mass of the dark-matter component. In this paper, we demonstrate that there exist relatively simple modifications of the traditional thermal freeze-out mechanism which "flip" the resulting abundance spectrum, producing abundances that scale inversely with mass. Moreover, we demonstrate that a far broader variety of scaling relations between lifetimes, abundances, and masses can emerge through thermal freeze-out than through the non-thermal mechanisms previously considered for DDM ensembles. The results of this paper thus extend the DDM framework into the thermal domain and essentially allow us to "design" our resulting DDM ensembles at will in order to realize a rich array of resulting dark-matter phenomenologies.