2 Note that a stable inflaton could also play the role of DM .3 These terms are allowed by symmetries and required for the draining of the excess energy stored in inflaton after preheating, as 2-to-2 scatterings of inflatons into DM or SM through terms λ φχ 2 φ 2 χ 2 and λ φH 2 φ 2 |H| 2 can not transfer the energy stored in inflaton completely.4 Since we are interested in the the epoch after inflation, where all relevant scales are much larger compared to the electroweak scale, we ignore the zero-temperature electroweak vev of the Higgs field. 5 Since in our context both λ φχ and λ φH remain small, as we will discuss latter, the quantum contribution from the scalar fields φ and χ do not improve the situation.

A number of experimental anomalies involving neutrinos hint towards the existence of at least an extra (a very light) sterile neutrino. However, such a species, appreciably mixing with the active neutrinos, is disfavored by different cosmological observations like Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Large Scale Structure (LSS). Recently, it was shown that the presence of additional interactions in the sterile neutrino sector via light bosonic mediators can make the scenario cosmologically viable by suppressing the production of the sterile neutrinos from active neutrinos via matter-like effect caused by the mediator. This mechanism works assuming the initial population of this sterile sector to be negligible with respect to that of the Standard Model (SM) particles, before the production from active neutrinos. However, there is fair chance that such bosonic mediators may couple to the inflaton and can be copiously produced during (p)reheating epoch. Consequently, they may ruin this assumption of initial small density of the sterile sector. In this article we, starting from inflation, investigate the production of such a sterile sector during (p)reheating in a large field inflationary scenario and identify the parameter region that allows for a viable early Universe cosmology.

In ΛCDM cosmology, Dark Matter (DM) and neutrinos are assumed to be noninteracting. However, it is possible to have scenarios, where DM-neutrino interaction may be present, leading to scattering of DM with neutrinos and annihilation of DM into neutrinos. We investigate the viability of such scenarios in the light of cosmological data by making use of the Planck 2018 dataset (high-l TT+TE+EE, low-l TT, low-l EE) and constrain these processes in the light of the same. We also discuss a viable particle DM model where DM-neutrino interaction is present, and map the constraints obtained to the parameter space of the model.

The non-thermal production of dark matter (DM) usually requires very tiny couplings of the dark sector with the visible sector and therefore is notoriously challenging to hunt in laboratory experiments. Here we propose a novel pathway to test such a production in the context of a non-standard cosmological history, using both gravitational wave (GW) and laboratory searches. We investigate the formation of DM from the decay of a scalar field that we dub as the reheaton, as it also reheats the Universe when it decays. We consider the possibility that the Universe undergoes a phase with kination-like stiff equation-of-state (wkin> 1/3) before the reheaton dominates the energy density of the Universe and eventually decays into Standard Model and DM particles. We then study how first-order tensor perturbations generated during inflation, the amplitude of which may get amplified during the kination era and lead to detectable GW signals. Demanding that the reheaton produces the observed DM relic density, we show that the reheaton’s lifetime and branching fractions are dictated by the cosmological scenario. In particular, we show that it is long-lived and can be searched by various experiments such as DUNE, FASER, FASER-II, MATHUSLA, SHiP, etc. We also identify the parameter space which leads to complementary observables for GW detectors such as LISA and u-DECIGO. In particular we find that a kination-like period with an equation-of-state parameter wkin ≈ 0.5 and a reheaton mass $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (0.5–5) GeV and a DM mass of $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (10–100) keV may lead to sizeable imprints in both kinds of searches.

We investigate for viable models of inflation that can successfully produce dark matter (DM) from inflaton decay process, satisfying all the constraints from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and from some other observations. In particular, we analyze near-inflection-point small field inflationary scenario with non-thermal production of fermionic DM from the decaying inflaton field during the reheating era. To this end, we propose two different models of inflation with polynomial potential. The potential of Model I contains terms proportional to linear, quadratic, and quartic in inflaton; whereas in Model II, the potential contains only even power of inflaton and the highest term is sextic in inflaton. For both the models, we find out possible constraints on the model parameters which lead to proper inflationary parameters from CMB data with a very small tensor-to-scalar ratio, as expected from a small-field model. With the allowed parameter space from CMB, we then search for satisfactory relic abundance for DM, that can be produced from inflaton via reheating, to match with the present-day cold dark matter (CDM) relic density for the parameter spaces of the DM χ mass and Yukawa couplings in the range 10−9 ≳ yχ ≳ 10−15 and 103GeV ≲ mχ ≲ 109GeV. The DM relic is associated with the inflection-points in each model via maximum temperature reached in the early universe during its production. Finally, we find out allowed parameter space coming out of combined constraints from stability analysis for both SM Higgs and DM decays from inflaton as well as from BBN and Lyman-α bounds.