Abstract: Primordial black holes (PBHs) are compact objects proposed to have formed in the early Universe from the collapse of small-scale over-densities. Their existence may be detected from the observation of gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by PBH mergers, if the signals can be distinguished from those produced by the merging of astrophysical black holes. In this work, we forecast the capability of the Einstein Telescope, a proposed third-generation GW observatory, to identify and measure the abundance of a subdominant population of distant PBHs, using the difference in the redshift evolution of the merger rate of the two populations as our discriminant. We carefully model the merger rates and generate realistic mock catalogues of the luminosity distances and errors that would be obtained from GW signals observed by the Einstein Telescope. We use two independent statistical methods to analyse the mock data, finding that, with our more powerful, likelihood-based method, PBH abundances as small as fPBH approximate to 7 x 10(-6) ( fPBH approximate to 2 x 10(-6)) would be distinguishable from f(PBH) = 0 at the level of 3 sigma with a one year (ten year) observing run of the Einstein Telescope. Our mock data generation code, darksirens, is fast, easily extendable and publicly available on GitLab.

Abstract: We use the latest constraints on the population of stellar origin binary black holes (SOBBH) from LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK) observations, to estimate the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) they generate in the frequency band of LISA. In order to account for the faint and distant binaries, which contribute the most to the SGWB, we extend the merger rate at high redshift assuming that it tracks the star formation rate. We adopt different methods to compute the SGWB signal: we perform an analytical evaluation, we use Monte Carlo sums over the SOBBH population realisations, and we account for the role of the detector by simulating LISA data and iteratively removing the resolvable signals until only the confusion noise is left. The last method allows the extraction of both the expected SGWB and the number of resolvable SOBBHs. Since the latter are few for signal-to-noise ratio thresholds larger than five, we confirm that the spectral shape of the SGWB in the LISA band agrees with the analytical prediction of a single power law. We infer the probability distribution of the SGWB amplitude from the LVK GWTC-3 posterior of the binary population model: at the reference frequency of 0.003 Hz it has an interquartile range of h2ΩGW(f = 3 × 10-3 Hz) ∈ [5.65, 11.5] × 10-13, in agreement with most previous estimates. We then perform a MC analysis to assess LISA's capability to detect and characterise this signal. Accounting for both the instrumental noise and the galactic binaries foreground, with four years of data, LISA will be able to detect the SOBBH SGWB with percent accuracy, narrowing down the uncertainty on the amplitude by one order of magnitude with respect to the range of possible amplitudes inferred from the population model. A measurement of this signal by LISA will help to break the degeneracy among some of the population parameters, and provide interesting constraints, in particular on the redshift evolution of the SOBBH merger rate.

Abstract: Dark matter particles gravitationally trapped inside the Sun may annihilate into Standard Model particles, producing a flux of neutrinos. The prospects of detecting these neutrinos in future multi-kt neutrino detectors designed for other physics searches are explored here. We study the capabilities of a 34/100 kt liquid argon detector and a 100 kt magnetized iron calorimeter detector. These detectors are expected to determine the energy and the direction of the incoming neutrino with unprecedented precision allowing for tests of the dark matter nature at very low dark matter masses, in the range of 10-25 GeV. By suppressing the atmospheric background with angular cuts, these techniques would be sensitive to dark matter-nucleon spin-dependent cross sections at the fb level, reaching down to a few ab for the most favorable annihilation channels and detector technology.

Abstract: Minimal Dark Matter (MDM) stands as one of the simplest dark matter scenarios. In MDM models, annihilation and co-annihilation processes among the members of the MDM multiplet are usually very efficient, pushing the dark matter mass above O(10) TeV in order to reproduce the observed dark matter relic density. Motivated by this little drawback, in this paper we consider an extension of the MDM scenario by three right-handed neutrinos. Two specific choices for the MDM multiplet are studied: a fermionic SU(2)(L) quintuplet and a scalar SU(2)(L) septuplet. The lightest right-handed neutrino, with tiny Yukawa couplings, never reaches thermal equilibrium in the early universe and is produced by freeze-in. This creates a link between dark matter and neutrino physics: dark matter can be non-thermally produced by the decay of the lightest right-handed neutrino after freeze-out, allowing to lower significantly the dark matter mass. We discuss the phenomenology of the non-thermally produced MDM and, taking into account significant Sommerfeld corrections, we find that the dark matter mass must have some specific values in order not to be in conflict with the current bounds from gamma-ray observations.

Abstract: Nonzero neutrino masses are required by the existence of flavour oscillations, with values of the order of at least 50 meV. We consider the gravitational clustering of relic neutrinos within the Milky Way, and used the N – one-body simulation technique to compute their density enhancement factor in the neighbourhood of the Earth with respect to the average cosmic density. Compared to previous similar studies, we pushed the simulation down to smaller neutrino masses, and included an improved treatment of the baryonic and dark matter distributions in the Milky Way. Our results are important for future experiments aiming at detecting the cosmic neutrino background, such as the Princeton Tritium Observatory for Light, Early-universe, Massive-neutrino Yield (PTOLEMY) proposal. We calculate the impact of neutrino clustering in the Milky Way on the expected event rate for a PTOLEMY-like experiment. We find that the effect of clustering remains negligible for the minimal normal hierarchy scenario, while it enhances the event rate by 10 to 20% (resp. a factor 1.7 to 2.5) for the minimal inverted hierarchy scenario (resp. a degenerate scenario with 150 meV masses). Finally we compute the impact on the event rate of a possible fourth sterile neutrino with a mass of 1.3 eV.