Gravitationally induced particle production and its impact on the WIMP abundance

Abstract

A large set of independent astronomical observations have provided a strong evidence for nonbaryonic dark matter in the Universe. One of the most investigated candidates is an unknown long-lived Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) which was in thermal equilibrium with the primeval plasma. Here we investigate the WIMP abundance based on the relativistic kinetic treatment for gravitationally induced particle production recently proposed in the literature (Lima and Baranov, 2014) [16]. The new evolution equation is deduced and solved both numerically and through a semi-analytical approach. The predictions of the WIMP observables are discussed and compared with the ones obtained in the standard approach.

Keywords

• Cosmology
• Dark energy
• Thermodynamics