Gravitational Dark Matter from Minimal Preheating

Abstract

Following our previous work, we continue to explore gravitational dark matter production during the minimal preheating caused by inflaton self-resonance. In this situation there is only one dimensionless index parameter $n$ characterizing the inflation potential after the end of inflation, which leads to a robust prediction on the gravitational dark matter relic abundance. Using lattice method to handle the non-perturbative evolutions of relevant quantities during the inflaton self-resonance, we derive the gravitational dark matter relic abundance arising from both the inflaton condensate and fluctuation annihilation. While being absent for $n=2$, the former one can instead dominate over the later one for $n=4,6$. Our results show that gravitational dark matter mass of $1.04~(2.66)\times 10^{14}$ GeV accommodates the observed value of dark matter relic abundance for $n=4$ (6).