Freeze-in production of FIMP dark matter

By L. Hall, K. Jedamzik, J. March-Russell, S. West. 2009

1,128 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose an alternate, calculable mechanism of dark matter genesis, “thermal freeze-in”, involving a Feebly Interacting Massive Particle (FIMP) interacting so feebly with the thermal bath that it never attains thermal equilibrium. As with the conventional “thermal freeze-out” production mechanism, the relic abundance reflects a combination of initial thermal distributions together with particle masses and couplings that can be measured in the laboratory or astrophysically. The freeze-in yield is IR dominated by low temperatures near the FIMP mass and is independent of unknown UV physics, such as the reheat temperature after inflation. Moduli and modulinos of string theory compactifications that receive mass from weak-scale supersymmetry breaking provide implementations of the freeze-in mechanism, as do models that employ Dirac neutrino masses or GUT-scale-suppressed interactions. Experimental signals of freeze-in and FIMPs can be spectacular, including the production of new metastable coloured or charged particles at the LHC as well as the alteration of big bang nucleosynthesis.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20289e8ec3ab4cb763d013c6f73ebfd5fc1ea774

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Citations in the corpus

Direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter with semiconductor targets (2015, neutral): “The χ abundance can receive an irreducible “freeze-in” [88] contribution from 2→ 2 annihilation of SM particles to χχ̄ as well as Z-boson decays to χχ̄, computed in [9] (see also [24]).”
Freeze-In dark matter with displaced signatures at colliders (2015, methodology): “This leads to interesting signals of long-lived stopped particles at colliders if B carries electric or color charge [9], but not if B is neutral.”
Precision early universe thermodynamics made simple: Neff and neutrino decoupling in the Standard Model and beyond (2020, background): “[68], or freeze-in dark matter [69], see e.”
A taste of dark matter: flavour constraints on pseudoscalar mediators (2014, neutral): “Note that even if gχ is so weak that the dark sector never thermalises, the observed relic abundance can be obtained via the freeze-in mechanism [111, 112].”
Detection of sub-MeV dark matter with three-dimensional Dirac materials (2017, background): “4 shows the theory expectation for a benchmark model where the DM abundance is set through freeze-in via a light mediator [32].”
UltraViolet freeze-in (2014, methodology): “3 VEV expansions of high dimension operators If any of the fields involved in the high dimension operator acquire VEVs then, by expanding the operator around the vacuum, one can construct a sequence of terms dressed by couplings of different mass dimension [1].”
Heavy spin-2 Dark Matter (2016, background): “This is the so-called freeze-in mechanism [67], which results in a non-thermalised sector, composed of the heavy spin-2 particles in our case.”
Anatomy of the inert two-Higgs-doublet model in the light of the LHC and non-LHC dark matter searches (2016, background): “This is the concept of our approach: we assume that in the case of underabundance there should be either additional sources of DM or mechanisms other than thermal freeze-out that compensate for the DM deficit, such as DM freeze-in scenarios [88].”
Dark matter models and direct detection (2019, background): “Freeze-in [56] is a mechanism whereby rare interactions within the SM thermal bath slowly build up an abundance of DM.”
New production mechanism for keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter by decays of frozen-in scalars (2013, methodology): “, the time when the temperature equals the FIMP mass mσ [66]) and τ = 1/Γ is the lifetime of the scalar particle σ, cf.”
Searching for long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider (2019, background): “More recent ideas include models with feebly interacting DM [146] (supersymmetric or not), asymmetric DM [478], J.”
Melanopogenesis: dark matter of (almost) any mass and baryonic matter from the evaporation of primordial black holes weighing a ton (or less) (2018, background): “We assume that the χ never attains thermal equilibrium after being produced (unless we specify otherwise, as is the case when we discuss the case of asymmetric dark matter), and that no processes exist that can freeze in any significant abundance of χ after black hole evaporation [27].”
Light dark matter: Models and constraints (2017, background): “The relic abundance can be fixed in a variety of ways, including via particle-antiparticle asymmetry as in asymmetric DM [11–13], strong dynamics [14,15], freeze-in [16,17], or other thermal histories for example [18–24].”
WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, background): “This has recently been advocated under the name of so-called freeze-in mechanism [78], as the final yield increases with 〈σannvMøl〉.”
The four basic ways of creating dark matter through a portal (2011, neutral): “[3] similar transitions have been obtained for other types of interactions.”