Dark matter production in the early Universe: beyond the thermal WIMP
  paradigm
  Increasingly stringent limits from LHC searches for new physics, coupled with
lack of convincing signals of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) in
dark matter searches, have tightly constrained many realizations of the
standard paradigm of thermally produced WIMPs as cold dark matter. In this
article, we review more generally both thermally and non-thermally produced
dark matter (DM). One may classify DM models into two broad categories: one
involving bosonic coherent motion (BCM) and the other involving WIMPs. BCM and
WIMP candidates need, respectively, some approximate global symmetries and
almost exact discrete symmetries. Supersymmetric axion models are highly
motivated since they emerge from compelling and elegant solutions to the two
fine-tuning problems of the Standard Model: the strong CP problem and the gauge
hierarchy problem. We review here non-thermal relics in a general setup, but we
also pay particular attention to the rich cosmological properties of various
aspects of mixed SUSY/axion dark matter candidates which can involve both WIMPs
and BCM in an interwoven manner. We also review briefly a panoply of
alternative thermal and non-thermal DM candidates.
