Description:

This talk will cover recent work proposing a non-thermal production mechanism of dark matter utilizing first-order phase transitions. The mechanism relies on a phase transition endowing dark matter with mass at some time after its standard thermal freeze-out. This leads to an enhancement in the dark matter abundance which can open the viable parameter space to models that would have otherwise produced too little dark matter in the standard thermal scenario. Furthermore, to accomplish the necessary enhancement and meet today’s observed relic abundance, we find that the phase transitions must be supercooled and are thus sources of gravitational waves strong enough to be detected by many upcoming and proposed experiments. This, in tandem with indirect searches of dark matter, provides a robust multi-messenger probe of such models; possibly shedding light on the underlying particle physics.

Cash Hauptmann, PhD Student, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Host: Adrian Thompson