Speaker
Description
In the usual approach to the determination of the dark matter thermal relic abundance, both from freeze-out and freeze-in mechanisms, one takes into account only 0-th moment of the Boltzmann equation, i.e. the equation for the particle number density. In case of freeze-out this comes from the assumption of local thermal equilibrium, while for freeze-in from neglecting annihilation processes. In this talk I will discuss how to go beyond this assumption and introduce DRAKE — a numerical precision tool that can trace not only the DM relic density, but also its velocity dispersion and full phase space distribution function. I will review the general motivation for this approach and highlight several examples of classes of models where processes responsible for kinetic and chemical equilibriation are intertwined in a way that can impact the value of the relic density by as much as an order of magnitude. Finally, I will comment on relevance and applicability of this approach to more involved DM models, like the MSSM.
