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PreprintCC BY 4.0arXiv

A relook at a low reheating temperature: Freeze-in versus Freeze-out

  • Debajyoti Choudhury
  • Vineet K. Jha
  • Rameswar Sahu
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Abstract

A lowering of the post-inflation reheating temperature TRH has attracted much attention as a means to facilitate obtaining the correct Dark Matter (DM) relic abundance. We take a relook at the paradigm under the assumption that the inflaton decay is essentially instantaneous, with the thermal bath coming into existence only at a relatively low temperature. We demonstrate that, contrary to the popular misconception, the relevant scale is not necessarily the DM mass itself, but the characteristic temperature at which the dominant DM production processes are thermally efficient. With TRH setting the maximum temperature available for thermal production, and thereby determining the accessible stages of the production history, lowering TRH tends to reduce the relic abundance. While this effect could, in principle, be offset by altering the couplings defining the theory, there exists a minimum TRH---determined by the mass spectrum---below which the relic abundance falls to minuscule levels, whether the mechanism be freeze-in or freeze-out.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@misc{choudhury2026relook,
  title = {{A relook at a low reheating temperature: Freeze-in versus Freeze-out}},
  author = {Debajyoti Choudhury and Vineet K. Jha and Rameswar Sahu},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.26348},
  eprint = {2609.26348},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26348},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY  - UNPB
TI  - A relook at a low reheating temperature: Freeze-in versus Freeze-out
AU  - Debajyoti Choudhury
AU  - Vineet K. Jha
AU  - Rameswar Sahu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/22
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.26348
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26348
AB  - A lowering of the post-inflation reheating temperature T_RH has attracted much attention as a means to facilitate obtaining the correct Dark Matter (DM) relic abundance. We take a relook at the paradigm under the assumption that the inflaton decay is essentially instantaneous, with the thermal bath coming into existence only at a relatively low temperature. We demonstrate that, contrary to the popular misconception, the relevant scale is not necessarily the DM mass itself, but the characteristic temperature at which the dominant DM production processes are thermally efficient. With T_RH setting the maximum temperature available for thermal production, and thereby determining the accessible stages of the production history, lowering T_RH tends to reduce the relic abundance. While this effect could, in principle, be offset by altering the couplings defining the theory, there exists a minimum T_RH---determined by the mass spectrum---below which the relic abundance falls to minuscule levels, whether the mechanism be freeze-in or freeze-out.
ER  -