Garcia, Marcos A.G.Amin, Mustafa A.2019-01-092019-01-092018Garcia, Marcos A.G. and Amin, Mustafa A.. "Prethermalization production of dark matter." <i>Physical Review D,</i> 98, no. 10 (2018) American Physical Society: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.103504.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105021At the end of inflation, the inflaton field decays into an initially nonthermal population of relativistic particles which eventually thermalize. We consider the production of dark matter via freeze-in from this relativistic plasma, focusing on the prethermal phase. We find that for a production cross section σ(E)∼En with n>2, the present dark matter abundance is produced during the prethermal phase of its progenitors. For n≤2, entropy production during reheating makes the nonthermal contribution to the present dark matter abundance subdominant compared to that produced thermally. As specific examples, we verify that the nonthermal contribution is irrelevant for gravitino production in low scale supersymmetric models (n=0) and is dominant for gravitino production in high scale supersymmetry models (n=6).engPublished 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.Journal articlePhysRevD.98.103504https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.103504