Jessie Shelton (University of Illinois)

Asymmetric reheating and cold dark sectors

In many theories of dark matter, the relic abundance is determined by self-interactions of fields within a thermal dark sector.  This immediately raises a cosmological question: how was this dark sector populated in the early universe?  I will discuss one of the simplest possible answers to this question, where the dark sector originates from the same period of reheating that populates the Standard Model, and work out some cosmological consequences. In particular, I will demonstrate that obtaining different temperatures in the two sectors is not automatic, which has interesting consequences for dark sectors with relativistic relics.

Feb 25 at 2:00 pm in Geo/Phys 407

  Link to slides.