News on cosmological gravitational particle production

by Enrico Bertuzzo

Wednesday 17 Dec 2025, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Rome

0M04

The persistent lack of signals in our quest for Dark Matter is starting to raise doubts on the assumption that it interacts non-gravitationally with other particles.Although it is still premature to dismiss any non-gravitational interaction, it is worthwhile to consider how the observed relic abundance could arise once the standard thermal and non-thermal production mechanisms—freeze-out and freeze-in—are set aside. In this talk, I will explore an alternative scenario: cosmological gravitational particle production, where quantum fluctuations in the early universe are amplified by cosmic expansion, generating a dark matter population. After a general review of the mechanism, I will discuss the robustness of its predicted relic abundance.