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Warm Little Inflaton becomes Cold Dark Matter

Authors: JG Rosa, Luís B. Ventura

Ref.: Physical Review Letters 122, 161301 (2019)

Abstract: We present a model where the inflaton can naturally account for all the dark matter in the Universe within the warm inflation paradigm. In particular, we show that the symmetries and particle content of the warm little inflaton scenario (i) avoid large thermal and radiative corrections to the scalar potential, (ii) allow for sufficiently strong dissipative effects to sustain a radiation bath during inflation that becomes dominant at the end of the slow-roll regime, and (iii) enable a stable inflaton remnant in the postinflationary epochs. The latter behaves as dark radiation during nucleosynthesis, leading to a non-negligible contribution to the effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom, and becomes the dominant cold dark matter component in the Universe shortly before matter-radiation equality for inflaton masses in the 10^-4–10^-1  eV range. Cold dark matter isocurvature perturbations, anticorrelated with the main adiabatic component, provide a smoking gun for this scenario that can be tested in the near future.