2017/05/31 by Raffaele Tito D’Agnolo, Raffaele Tito D'Agnolo, Duccio Pappadopulo +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Annihilation #Astrophysics #Black-body radiation #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Decoupling (probability) #Light dark matter #Mixed dark matter #Nuclear physics #Observable #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum mechanics #Radiation #Scalar field dark matter #Warm dark matter #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.119.061102
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 061102 (2017) · 8 pages, 6 figures. V3: figure added
openalex created_date 2017/06/05 · openalex publication_date 2017/08/08 · arxiv created 2017/12/16 · arxiv updated 2017/12/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We propose that the dark matter abundance is set by the decoupling of inelastic scattering instead of annihilations. This coscattering mechanism is generically realized if dark matter scatters against states of comparable mass from the thermal bath. Coscattering points to dark matter that is exponentially lighter than the weak scale and has a suppressed annihilation rate, avoiding stringent constraints from indirect detection. Dark matter upscatters into states whose late decays can lead to observable distortions to the blackbody spectrum of the cosmic microwave background.