Largest temperature of the radiation era and its cosmological implications

Abstract

The thermal history of the universe before the epoch of nucleosynthesis is unknown. The maximum temperature in the radiation-dominated era, which we will refer to as the reheat temperature, may have been as low as 0.7 MeV. In this paper we show that a low reheat temperature has important implications for many topics in cosmology. We show that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP's) may be produced even if the reheat temperature is much smaller than the freeze-out temperature of the WIMP, and that the dependence of the present abundance on the mass and the annihilation cross section of the WIMP differs drastically from familiar results. We reexamine predictions of the relic abundance and resulting model constraints of supersymmetric dark matter, axions, massive neutrinos, and other dark matter candidates, nucleosynthesis constraints on decaying particles, and leptogenesis by decay of superheavy particles. We find that the allowed parameter space of supersymmetric models is altered, removing the usual bounds on the mass spectrum; the cosmological bound on massive neutrinos is drastically changed, ruling out Dirac (Majorana) neutrino masses ${m}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}$ only in the range 33 keV $\ensuremath{\lesssim}{m}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}\ensuremath{\lesssim}6$ (5) MeV, which is significantly smaller from the standard disallowed range 94 eV $\ensuremath{\lesssim}{m}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}\ensuremath{\lesssim}2$ GeV (this implies that massive neutrinos may still play the role of either warm or cold dark matter); the cosmological upper bound on the Peccei-Quinn scale may be significantly increased to ${10}^{16}$ GeV from the usually cited limit of about ${10}^{12}$ GeV; and that efficient out-of-equilibrium grand unified theory GUT baryogenesis and/or leptogenesis can take place even if the reheat temperature is much smaller than the mass of the decaying superheavy particle.