(Non-)Thermal Production of WIMPs during Kination

Understanding the nature of the Dark Matter (DM) is one of the current challenges in 1 modern astrophysics and cosmology. Knowing the properties of the DM particle would shed light on 2 physics beyond the Standard Model and even provide us with details of the early Universe. In fact, 3 the detection of such a relic would bring us information from the pre-Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) 4 period, an epoch from which we have no data, and could even hint at inflationary physics. In this 5 work, we assume that the expansion rate of the Universe after inflationary is governed by the kinetic 6 energy of a scalar field φ, in the so-called “kination” model. We assume that the φ field decays into 7 both radiation and DM particles, which we take to be Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). 8 The present abundance of WIMPs is then fixed during the kination period through either a thermal 9 “freeze-out” or “freeze-in” mechanism, or through a non-thermal process governed by the decay of φ. 10 We explore the parameter space of this theory with the requirement that the present WIMP abundance 11 provides the correct DM relic budget. Requiring that BBN occurs during the standard cosmological 12 scenario sets a limit on the temperature at which the kination period ends. Using this limit and 13 assuming the WIMP has a mass mχ = 100 GeV, we obtain that the thermally-averaged WIMP 14 annihilation cross section has to satisfy the constraints 3.5× 10−16 GeV−2 . 〈σv〉 . 1.4× 10−5 GeV−2 15 in order for having at least one of the production mechanism to yield the observed amount of DM. 16 This result shows how the properties of the WIMP particle, if ever measured, can yield information 17 on the pre-BBN content of the Universe. 18