Distinguishing thermal histories of dark matter from structure formation

Speaker: 
Fei Huang
Institution: 
Weizmann Institute of Science
Date: 
Thursday, June 13, 2024
Time: 
11:00 am
Location: 
NS2 1201

Abstract: It is important to understand the implications of current observational constraints and potential signatures on the thermal history of dark matter. In this work, we build the connection between the present-day velocities and the production mechanism of dark matter and find that the current observation on structure formation can be imposed to constrain the decoupling temperatures and the phase-space distribution of dark matter. We further explore the potential of distinguishing different possible thermal histories of dark matter with hypothetical future observational data. Using the freeze-in/-out scenarios as templates, we find that future precision data may uniquely identify the allowed parameter spaces for freeze-in and freeze-out, or even completely rule out one of the scenarios. This method can be more generally applied to other scenarios.

Host: 
Yuri Shirman