How an era of kination impacts substructure and the dark matter annihilation rate

Abstract

An era of kination occurs when the Universe's energy density is dominated by a fast-rolling scalar field. Dark matter that is thermally produced during an era of kination requires larger-than-canonical annihilation cross sections to generate the observed dark matter relic abundance. Furthermore, dark matter density perturbations that enter the horizon during an era of kination grow linearly with the scale factor prior to radiation domination. We show how the resulting enhancement to the small-scale matter power spectrum increases the microhalo abundance and boosts the dark matter annihilation rate. We then use gamma-ray observations to constrain thermal dark matter production during kination. The annihilation boost factor depends on the minimum halo mass, which is determined by the small-scale cutoff in the matter power spectrum. Therefore, observational limits on the dark matter annihilation rate imply a minimum cutoff scale for a given dark matter particle mass and kination scenario. For dark matter that was once in thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model, this constraint establishes a maximum allowed kinetic decoupling temperature for the dark matter. This bound on the decoupling temperature implies that the growth of perturbations during kination cannot appreciably boost the dark matter annihilation rate if dark matter was once in thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model.