Can the Inflaton Also Be a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle?

Open Access

Can the Inflaton Also Be a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle?

Dan Hooper, Gordan Krnjaic, Andrew J. Long, and Samuel D. McDermott

Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 091802 – Published 6 March 2019

Abstract

We propose a class of models in which a stable inflaton is produced as a thermal relic in the early Universe and constitutes the dark matter. We show that inflaton annihilations can efficiently reheat the Universe, and identify several examples of inflationary potentials that can accommodate all cosmic microwave background observables and in which the inflaton dark matter candidate has a weak scale mass. As a simple example, we consider annihilations that take place through a Higgs portal interaction, leading to encouraging prospects for future direct detection experiments.

Received 17 July 2018
Revised 4 February 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.091802

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Inflation Particle dark matter Particle interactions

Weakly interacting massive particles

Particles & FieldsGravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Authors & Affiliations

Dan Hooper^1,2,3, Gordan Krnjaic¹, Andrew J. Long², and Samuel D. McDermott¹

¹Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Theoretical Astrophysics Group, Batavia, Illinois 60510, USA
²University of Chicago, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
³University of Chicago, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA