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Superheavy dark matter

We show that, contrary to the standard lore, dark matter may be superheavy (many orders of magnitude larger than the weak scale). We show that massive particles may be produced naturally during the transition from the inflationary phase to either a matter-dominated or radiation-dominated phase as a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Chung, Daniel J.H., Kolb, Edward W., Riotto, Antonio
Lenguaje:eng
Publicado: 1998
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.59.023501
http://cds.cern.ch/record/344949
Descripción
Sumario:We show that, contrary to the standard lore, dark matter may be superheavy (many orders of magnitude larger than the weak scale). We show that massive particles may be produced naturally during the transition from the inflationary phase to either a matter-dominated or radiation-dominated phase as a result of the expansion of the background spacetime acting on vacuum quantum fluctuations of the dark matter field. We find that as long as there are stable particles whose mass is of the order of the inflaton mass (presumably around 10^13 GeV), they will be produced in sufficient abundance to give Omega_0=1 quite independently of any details of the non-gravitational interactions of the dark-matter field.