Conveners
Cosmology, Dark Matter
- Keith Dienes (University of Arizona)
I show that a nonstandard cosmological history with a period of early matter domination driven by a sub-TeV visible-sector particle can arise rather naturally. This scenario involves a long-lived standard model singlet that acquires a thermal abundance at high temperatures from decays and inverse decays of a parent particle with SM charge(s), and subsequently dominates the energy density of...
One signature of an expanding universe is the time-variation of the cosmological abundances of its different components. For example, a radiation-dominated universe inevitably gives way to a matter-dominated universe, and critical moments such as matter-radiation equality are fleeting. In this talk, we point out that this lore is not always correct, and that it is possible to obtain a form of...
I will discuss the possibility that the coupling constants are dynamical quantities which take different values during early cosmological epochs. In particular, I will show that such scenarios (focused on the gauge couplings of either the SU(2) or SU(3) SM interactions) can have a profound effect on the production of dark matter through various mechanisms, resulting in different expectations...
