A map of the non-thermal WIMP

Abstract

We study the effect of the elastic scattering on the non-thermal WIMP, which is produced by direct decay of heavy particles at the end of reheating. The non-thermal WIMP becomes important when the reheating temperature is well below the freeze-out temperature. Usually, two limiting cases have been considered. One is that the produced high energetic dark matter particles are quickly thermalized due to the elastic scattering with background radiations. The corresponding relic abundance is determined by the thermally averaged annihilation cross-section at the reheating temperature. The other one is that the initial abundance is too small for the dark matter to annihilate so that the final relic is determined by the initial amount itself. We study the regions between these two limits, and show that the relic density depends not only on the annihilation rate, but also on the elastic scattering rate. Especially, the relic abundance of the p-wave annihilating dark matter crucially relies on the elastic scattering rate because the annihilation cross-section is sensitive to the dark matter velocity. We categorize the parameter space into several regions where each region has distinctive mechanism for determining the relic abundance of the dark matter at the present Universe. The consequence on the (in)direct detection is also studied. © 2017 The Author(s