Mechanism for dark matter depopulation

Understand

Early decoupling of thermally produced dark matter particles due to feeble interactions with the surrounding plasma typically results in their excessive abundance.

• In this work we propose a simple mechanism for dark matter depopulation.
• It relies on a specific cosmological evolution under which dark matter particles become temporarily unstable and hence decay away reducing the overall abundance.
• The instability phase may be followed by an incomplete regeneration phase until the final abundance is established.