Dilaton dominance in the early universe dilutes dark matter relic abundances

The role of the dilaton field and its coupling to matter may result in a dilution of dark matter (DM) relic densities. This is to be contrasted with quintessence scenarios in which relic densities are augmented, due to modification of the expansion rate, since the Universe is not radiation dominated at DM decoupling. The dilaton field, besides this, affects relic densities through its coupling to dust which tends to decrease relic abundances. Thus two separate mechanisms compete with each other resulting, in general, in a decrease of the relic density. This feature may be welcomed and can help the situation if direct dark matter experiments point towards small neutralino-nucleon cross sections, implying small neutralino annihilation rates and hence large relic densities, at least in the popular supersymmetric scenarios. In the presence of a diluting mechanism, both experimental constraints can be met. The role of the dilaton for this mechanism has been studied in the context of the noncritical string theory but in this work we follow a rather general approach assuming that the dilaton dominates only at early eras long before big bang nucleosynthesis.