Speaker
Description
Lack of conclusive experimental evidences in favour of thermally produced dark matter (DM) candidates have made non-thermal DM production mechanisms popular among the community. In this talk, I will discuss two distinct possibilities: (1) DM production from inflaton decays, and (2) DM production from reheaton decays. While the inflaton provides a compelling framework for explaining the large-scale homogeneity and isotropy of the Universe, the reheaton is an intermediate particle originating from the inflaton that can play a crucial role in establishing the standard radiation-dominated era prior to Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). I will also discuss how, in the first scenario, Lyman-$\alpha$ forest observations, and in the second, measurements of the inflationary stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB), can serve as powerful probes of non-thermal DM.