Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Volume 99, Issue 11, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.99.115009
Keywords
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Funding
- National Science Foundation (NSF) [AST-1813694]
- Department of Energy (DOE) [DE-SC0019018, DE-SC0019195]
- Dean's Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship at Harvard University
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
- NSF [NSF PHY-1748958]
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
- Hertz Foundation Fellowship
- Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University
- U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) [DE-SC0019195, DE-SC0019018] Funding Source: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
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Dark matter (DM) could couple to particles in the Standard Model (SM) through a light vector mediator. In the limit of small coupling, this portal could be responsible for producing the observed DM abundance through a mechanism known as freeze-in. Furthermore, the requisite DM-SM couplings provide a concrete benchmark for direct and indirect searches for DM. We present updated calculations of the relic abundance for DM produced by freeze-in through a light vector mediator. We identify an additional production channel: the decay of photons that acquire an in-medium plasma mass. These plasmon decays are a dominant channel for DM production for sub-MeV DM masses, and including this channel leads to a significant reduction in the predicted signal strength for DM searches. Accounting for production from both plasmon decays and annihilations of SM femlions, the DM acquires a highly nonthermal phase-space distribution which impacts the cosmology at later times; these cosmological effects will be explored in a companion paper.
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