Dr. Mathias Garny

Quantum effects in dark matter annihilation

Quantum corrections can have a large impact on thermal dark matter production in certain well-motivated cases. A well-known example is Sommerfeld enhancement, featuring resonances of the annihilation cross section that would be missed in a tree-level computation. Another related effect is the formation of bound states. After some review of those effects, we discuss examples for which a particular enhancement occurs due to excited bound states and quasi bound-states, respectively.