Making dark matter out of light - Livestream

Dark matter could be a “thermal-ish" relic of freeze-in, where the dark matter is produced by extremely feeble interactions with Standard Model particles dominantly at low temperatures. In this talk, I will discuss how dark matter can be made through freeze-in, accounting for a dominant channel where the dark matter gets produced by the decay of plasmons (photons that have an in-medium mass in the primordial plasma of our Universe). I will also explain how the resulting non-thermal dark matter velocity distribution can impact cosmological evolution, setting the stage for using the dark matter phase space as a handle for indirectly detecting dark matter in the future.

Speaker: Katelin Schutz, Massachusets Institute of Technology

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