Neutralino Dark Matter in Scenarios with Early Matter Domination

Understand

We investigate the production of neutralino dark matter in a cosmological scenario featuring an early matter dominated era ending at a relatively low reheating temperature.

• In such scenarios different production mechanisms of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), besides the well--studied thermal production, can be important.
• This opens up new regions of parameter space where the lightest neutralino, as the best--known supersymmetric (SUSY) WIMP, obtains the required relic abundance.
• Many of these new sets of parameters are also compatible with current limits from colliders as well as direct and indirect WIMP searches.