Inflationary Imprints on Dark Matter

10 Sept 2015, 14:00
20m
Rm 207

Rm 207

Speaker

Tommi Tenkanen (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Description

A generic feature of Standard Model extensions with no drastic modifications to the Higgs potential is that the Higgs is a light and energetically subdominant field during inflation. Inflationary fluctuations generically displace the field from its vacuum generating a primordial Higgs condensate. This sets specific out-of-equilibrium initial conditions for the hot big bang epoch which could have significant observational ramifications. In this work we investigate how these initial conditions set by inflation affect the generation of dark matter in the class of portal scenarios where the Standard Model fields feel new physics only through Higgs mediated couplings. As representatives examples we will consider a scalar singlet s coupled to Higgs by V = λh2s2 and a singlet fermion N coupled to the scalar s by gsNN. This simple extension has interesting consequences as these singlets constitute a dark matter candidate originating from non-thermal production of scalar and fermion particles out from a singlet condensate and, moreover, reveals a novel connection between dark matter and fundamental inflationary physics.

Presentation materials