Superheavy dark matter

Abstract

We show that in large-field inflationary scenarios, superheavy (many orders of magnitude larger than the weak scale) dark matter will be produced in cosmologically interesting quantities if superheavy stable particles exist in the mass spectrum. We show that these particles may be produced naturally during the transition from the inflationary phase to either a matter-dominated or radiation-dominated phase as a result of the expansion of the background spacetime acting on vacuum quantum fluctuations of the dark matter field. We find that as long as there are stable particles whose mass is of the order of the inflaton mass (presumably around ${10}^{13}\mathrm{GeV}$), they will be produced in sufficient abundance to give ${\ensuremath{\Omega}}_{0}=1,$ quite independently of any details of the nongravitational interactions of the dark-matter field.