Super-Heavy Dark Matter - Towards Predictive Scenarios from Inflation

Understand

A generic prediction of the Coleman-Weinberg inflation is the existence of a heavy particle sector whose interactions with the inflaton, the lightest state in this sector, generate the inflaton potential at loop level.

• For typical interactions the heavy sector may contain stable states whose relic abundance is generated at the end of inflation by the gravity alone.
• This general feature, and the absence of any particle physics signal of dark matter so far, motivates us to look for new directions in the dark sector physics, including scenarios in which dark matter is super-heavy.
• In this article we study the possibility that the dark matter is even heavier than the inflaton, its existence follows from the inflaton dynamics, and its abundance today is {\it naturally} determined by the weakness of gravitational interaction.