Reheating and Dark Matter Production

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the process of reheating after inflation influences dark matter production, emphasizing the importance of thermalization rates and temperature evolution, and explores observational signals to constrain such models.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of out-of-equilibrium dark matter production during reheating, highlighting the sensitivity to thermalization and temperature dynamics, and discusses potential observational constraints.

Findings

Dark matter relic abundance depends on thermalization rate.

Temperature evolution significantly affects dark matter production.

Potential signals include neutrinos, gamma-ray lines, and Lyman-alpha data.

Abstract

A concise summary of out-of-equilibrium dark matter production during post-inflationary reheating is presented. We show that the dark matter relic abundance is in general sensitive to the thermalization rate of the inflaton decay products, and the evolution of the temperature of the subsequently thermalized radiation. We discuss how smoking-gun signals, such as monochromatic neutrinos or gamma-ray lines, or Lyman-$\alpha$ data, can help constrain out-of-equilibrium DM models.