Freeze-in at all couplings
Abstract
We perform a comprehensive analysis of a charged parent freeze-in dark matter model, focusing on scenarios where the Universe reheats to a temperature comparable to or lower than the mass scales of the theory. In such configurations, dark matter production is Boltzmann-suppressed, allowing for stronger couplings between dark matter and the Standard Model thermal bath while still reproducing the observed relic abundance. We emphasize the non-trivial interplay between the reheating temperature, the mediator and dark matter masses and the coupling strength. We show that tracking the number density evolution of both dark matter and the mediator is essential to obtain reliable predictions, including unexpected behaviors such as the mediator non-equilibration due to fast decays. Lastly, we explore the phenomenological implications of this scenario, updating constraints from LHC searches and lepton flavour-violating decays and highlighting the complementarity of these searches in probing the cosmologically viable parameter space.
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BibTeX
@misc{goudelis2026freezein,
title = {{Freeze-in at all couplings}},
author = {Andreas Goudelis and Andre Lessa and Lucas Magno Dantas Ramos and Thomas Reggio},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.19564},
eprint = {2606.19564},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19564},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Freeze-in at all couplings
AU - Andreas Goudelis
AU - Andre Lessa
AU - Lucas Magno Dantas Ramos
AU - Thomas Reggio
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.19564
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19564
AB - We perform a comprehensive analysis of a charged parent freeze-in dark matter model, focusing on scenarios where the Universe reheats to a temperature comparable to or lower than the mass scales of the theory. In such configurations, dark matter production is Boltzmann-suppressed, allowing for stronger couplings between dark matter and the Standard Model thermal bath while still reproducing the observed relic abundance. We emphasize the non-trivial interplay between the reheating temperature, the mediator and dark matter masses and the coupling strength. We show that tracking the number density evolution of both dark matter and the mediator is essential to obtain reliable predictions, including unexpected behaviors such as the mediator non-equilibration due to fast decays. Lastly, we explore the phenomenological implications of this scenario, updating constraints from LHC searches and lepton flavour-violating decays and highlighting the complementarity of these searches in probing the cosmologically viable parameter space.
ER -