Defect-Mediated Conversion: Dark Matter from Cosmological Domain-Wall Scattering

Abstract

We propose a new mechanism for dark matter genesis, \emph{Defect-Mediated Conversion} (DMC). Cosmological domain walls can host a scalar condensate in their core acting as a mixing portal between the Standard Model and a dark sector: thermal-bath fermions crossing the wall are partially and non-thermally converted into dark particles. The conversion probability is governed by a single dimensionless mixing area built from the wall profile, and the yield by the area density of the network. For a light dark particle the probability is independent of both the incident energy and the dark mass, and the relic abundance collapses onto a single mass--coupling relation running from the keV Lyman-$α$ floor to the wall-formation scale. For a heavy one, conversion turns the energy of a single incident fermion into the dark mass, populating dark sectors with masses exceeding both the bath temperature and the mediator mass. The same portal also sources ordinary freeze-in, but DMC, boosted by the coherent wall-area enhancement, dominates it by one to two orders of magnitude at fixed couplings and remains operative in the heavy regime, where freeze-in shuts off.