- Physical Review Journals
All JournalsPhysics Magazine

Physical Review Letters

Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Open Access

Coherent Freeze-Out of Dark Matter

Steven Ferrante*, Maxim Perelstein†, and Bingrong Yu‡

  • *Contact author: sef87@cornell.edu
  • †Contact author: m.perelstein@cornell.edu
  • ‡Contact author: bingrong.yu@cornell.edu
PDF

Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 201004 – Published 20 May, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/2f8m-hy53

Abstract

We propose a novel coherent freeze-out mechanism where a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) is quadratically coupled to a light axionlike particle (ALP). Although the coupling is too feeble to thermalize the ALP, coherent forward scattering induces medium-dependent mass shifts that significantly modify both WIMP freeze-out and ALP misalignment dynamics. The symmetry of the ALP potential is broken at high temperatures and restored through either a first-order transition or a crossover. In the former, WIMPs alone compose dark matter with annihilation cross sections enhanced by up to 3 orders of magnitude relative to the standard scenario; in the latter, a Planck-suppressed coupling naturally yields an ALP abundance of the order of the observed dark matter density, largely independent of its initial displacement and mass.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

Supplemental Material

References (32)

  1. M. Cirelli, A. Strumia, and J. Zupan, arXiv:2406.01705.
  2. D. J. E. Marsh, Phys. Rep. 643, 1 (2016).
  3. R. N. Mohapatra and G. Senjanovic, Phys. Rev. D 20, 3390 (1979).
  4. G. R. Dvali and G. Senjanovic, Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 5178 (1995).
  5. M. Pietroni, N. Rius, and N. Tetradis, Phys. Lett. B 397, 119 (1997).
  6. A. Riotto and G. Senjanovic, Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 349 (1997).
  7. J. R. Espinosa, M. Losada, and A. Riotto, Phys. Rev. D 72, 043520 (2005).
  8. B. Shakya, arXiv:2511.08843.
  9. N. Schupper and N. M. Shnerb, Phys. Rev. E 72, 046107 (2005).
  10. F. Piazza and M. Pospelov, Phys. Rev. D 82, 043533 (2010).
  11. T. Moroi, K. Mukaida, K. Nakayama, and M. Takimoto, J. High Energy Phys. 06 (2013) 040.
  12. B. Lillard, M. Ratz, M. P. T. Tait, and S. Trojanowski, J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 07 (2018) 056.
  13. S. Ramazanov, E. Babichev, D. Gorbunov, and A. Vikman, Phys. Rev. D 105, 063530 (2022).
  14. B. Batell and A. Ghalsasi, Phys. Rev. D 107, L091701 (2023).
  15. D. Cyncynates and O. Simon, Phys. Rev. D 112, 055002 (2025).
  16. D. Cyncynates and O. Simon, Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 101003 (2025).
  17. A. Banerjee, N. H. Nguyen, and E. H. Tanin, arXiv:2509.25308.
  18. P. W. Graham, H. Ramani, O. Simon, and E. H. Tanin, arXiv:2511.09614.
  19. E. Epelbaum, H.-W. Hammer, and U.-G. Meissner, Rev. Mod. Phys. 81, 1773 (2009).
  20. R. Machleidt and D. R. Entem, Phys. Rep. 503, 1 (2011).
  21. A. Hook and J. Huang, J. High Energy Phys. 06 (2018) 036.
  22. F. Bigazzi, A. L. Cotrone, M. Järvinen, and E. Kiritsis, J. High Energy Phys. 01 (2020) 100.
  23. L. Di Luzio, M. Giannotti, E. Nardi, and L. Visinelli, Phys. Rep. 870, 1 (2020).
  24. H. Fukuda and S. Shirai, Phys. Rev. D 105, 095030 (2022).
  25. See Supplemental Material at http://link.aps.org/supplemental/10.1103/2f8m-hy53 for more technical details.
  26. E. W. Kolb and M. S. Turner, The Early Universe (Taylor and Francis, London, 2019), Vol. 69.
  27. T. R. Slatyer, Phys. Rev. D 93, 023527 (2016).
  28. T. R. Slatyer, Phys. Rev. D 93, 023521 (2016).
  29. N. Aghanim et al. (Planck Collaboration), Astron. Astrophys. 641, A6 (2020); 652, C4(E) (2021).
  30. K. Griest and M. Kamionkowski, Phys. Rev. Lett. 64, 615 (1990).
  31. H. Goldberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 50, 1419 (1983); 103, 099905(E) (2009).
  32. S. Ferrante, M. Perelstein, and B. Yu (to be published).

Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 201004– Published 20 May, 2026
  • Received 19 December 2025
  • Revised 25 March 2026
  • Accepted 27 April 2026
Crossmark - Check for updates button
Creative Commons Logo

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation