Dark Matter Production in Weyl $R^2$ Inflation

Understand

Dark matter and inflation are two key elements to understand the origin of cosmic structures in modern cosmology, and yet their exact physical models remain largely uncertain.

• The Weyl scaling invariant theory of gravity may provide a feasible scheme to solve these two puzzles jointly, which contains a massive gauge boson playing the role of dark matter candidate, and allows the quadratic scalar curvature term, namely $R^2$, to realize a viable inflationary mechanism in agreement with current observations.
• We ponder on the production of dark matters in the Weyl $R^2$ model, including the contribution from the non-perturbative production due to the quantum fluctuations from inflationary vacuum and perturbative ones from scattering.
• We demonstrate that there are generally three parameter ranges for viable dark matter production: (1) If the reheating temperature is larger than $10^3~\mathrm{GeV}$, the Weyl gauge boson as dark matter can be produced abundantly with mass larger than the inflation scale $\sim 10^{13}~\mathrm{GeV}$.