Speaker
Description
In the usual approach to the determination of dark matter thermal relic abundance an assumption of local thermal equilibrium is made. In this talk I will discuss how to go beyond this assumption and will 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, for illustration, highlight three concrete classes of models where kinetic and chemical decoupling are intertwined in a way that can impact the value of the relic density by as much as an order of magnitude: i) dark matter annihilation via a narrow resonance, ii) Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation and iii) `forbidden' annihilation to final states that are kinematically inaccessible at threshold.
