Seminarium Teorii Oddziaływań Elementarnych

Current observational limits on the dark matter annihilation cross section, as well as expected sensitivities of future experiments suggest that unraveling the nature of dark matter may require going beyond the standard thermal WIMP paradigm. In my talk I will discuss this issue in the context of low reheating temperature of the Universe after the cosmological inflation. I will assume that, either the dark matter particles are extremely weakly interacting and therefore they were produced only in out-of-equilibrium processes, or that the standard equilibrium production of WIMP-like particles was additionally supplemented by a non-thermal component. The case with a suppressed dark matter relic density due to an additional entropy production will also be considered. In addition, I will discuss possible prospects for determining the properties of such non-standard WIMPs. All the results will be illustrated in the specific case of supersymmetric dark matter.