Forays into the dark side of the swamp

Understand

Motivated by the swampland conjectures, we study cosmological signatures of a quintessence potential which induces time variation in the low energy effective field theory.

• After deriving the evolution of the quintessence field, we illustrate its possible ramifications by exploring putative imprints in a number of directions of particle phenomenology.
• We first show that a dark matter self-interaction rate increasing with time gives a novel way of reconciling the large self interactions required to address small scale structure issues with the constraint coming from clusters.
• Next, we study the effects of kinetic mixing variation during the radiation dominated era on freeze-in dark matter production.