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CCAPP Seminar - Adrienne Erickcek (UNC-Chapel Hill) " An Early-Universe Boost to the Dark Matter Annihilation Rate"

Adrienne Erickcek smiling with empty blackboard behind her
October 20, 2015
11:30 am - 12:30 pm
4138 Physics Research Building

Our ignorance of the Universe's evolution prior to the onset of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis profoundly limits our understanding of dark matter: we cannot calculate its relic abundance without knowing when the Universe became radiation dominated.  Fortunately, there is another probe of the early Universe that could break this degeneracy.  I will show how an effectively matter-dominated era prior to the onset of nucleosynthesis can radically enhance the population of microhalos for both thermal and nonthermal dark matter.   I will then discuss how the resulting abundance of substructure affects the dark matter annihilation rate, which opens up the possibility of using gamma-ray observations to learn about the reheating of the Universe and the origins of dark matter.