Seminarium "Teoria cząstek elementarnych i kosmologia"

Motivated by the fact that so far all evidence for dark matter (DM) has a gravitational origin, I will explore an extreme possibility of the dark sector coupled to the Standard Model (SM) only through gravity. I will focus on the case where DM consists of spin-1 particles and investigate non-perturbative and several perturbative production mechanisms. In the first case, I will discuss particle creation in the time-varying gravitational background during the de Sitter stage of ination. The latter will refer to the particle production during the reheating phase via the freeze-in from the SM particles' annihilation or as a result of the direct inaton decay. I will demonstrate that in each case there exists a viable range in parameter space that reproduces the observed relic abundance.