Asymmetric Reheating of a Dark Sector
We study asymmetric post-inflationary reheating in a framework with two sequestered MSSM-like sectors (the ``visible'' and ``dark'' sectors) with different supersymmetry-breaking scales, with dark matter corresponding to the lightest dark baryons. In this setup, independent Affleck-Dine dynamics in the two sectors offers a natural explanation for the comparable abundances of visible and dark matter. We relate the resulting temperature hierarchy to the inflaton's partial decay widths in different kinematical regimes, where it may decay into dark sector particles via 2-, 3- or 4-body processes. The latter case yields the most asymmetric reheating scenario, and we discuss the implications of this regime for the dark sector's thermal history, namely regarding the corresponding strong and weak interactions. While in this kinematical regime the contribution of light dark sector degrees of freedom to $ΔN_{\rm eff}$ is negligible, we show that it increases significantly in the regime where 3-body decays are possible, particularly near the threshold for dark Higgs pair-production where $ΔN_{\rm eff}^{\max} \simeq 0.078$. The current combined BBN+CMB+BAO bound leaves only a narrow allowed interval of the 2-body decay regime immediately above threshold, while next-generation CMB experiments could probe slightly below it.