Scalar dark matter production from preheating and structure formation constraints
Marcos A. G. García, Mathias Pierre, Sarunas Verner
Abstract
We investigate the out-of-equilibrium production of scalar dark matter (DM) from the inflaton condensate during inflation and reheating. We assume that this scalar couples only to the inflaton via a direct quartic coupling and is minimally coupled to gravity. We consider all possible production regimes: purely gravitational, weak direct coupling (perturbative), and strong direct coupling (nonperturbative). For each regime, we use different approaches to determine the dark matter phase space distribution and the corresponding relic abundance. For the purely gravitational regime, scalar dark matter quanta are copiously excited during inflation resulting in an infrared (IR) dominated distribution function and a relic abundance which overcloses the universe for a reheating temperature ${T}_{\mathrm{reh}}>34\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$. A nonvanishing direct coupling induces an effective DM mass and suppresses the large IR modes in favor of ultraviolet (UV) modes and a minimal scalar abundance is generated when the interference between the direct and gravitational couplings is maximal. For large direct couplings, backreaction on the inflaton condensate is accounted for by using the Hartree approximation and lattice simulation techniques. Since scalar DM candidates can behave as noncold dark matter, we estimate the impact of such species on the matter power spectrum and derive the corresponding constraints from the Lyman-$\ensuremath{\alpha}$ measurements. We find that they correspond to a lower bound on the DM mass of $\ensuremath{\gtrsim}3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ for purely gravitational production, and $\ensuremath{\gtrsim}20\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ for direct coupling production. We discuss the implications of these results.