Dark Matter Freeze-In during Warm Inflation and the Seesaw Mechanism

Abstract

A compelling way to address the inflationary period is via the warm inflation scenario, where the interaction of the inflaton field with other degrees of freedom affects its dynamics in such a way that slow-roll inflation is maintained by dissipative effects in a thermal bath. In this context, if a dark matter particle is coupled to the bath due to non-renormalizable interactions, the observed dark matter abundance may be produced during warm inflation via ultra-violet freeze-in. In this work, we propose applying this scenario in the framework of a $U(1)_{B-L}$ gauge extension of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, where we also employ the seesaw mechanism for generating neutrino masses.