If the dark matter is produced in the early universe prior to Big Bang nucleosynthesis, a modified cosmological history can drastically affect the abundance of relic dark matter particles. Here, we assume that an additional species to radiation dominates at early times, whose energy density red-shifts faster than radiation, causing the expansion rate at a given temperature to be larger than in the standard radiation-dominated case. We consider the cases of dark matter production via freeze-out and freeze-in in theses non-standard cosmologies.

For the first case, dark matter freeze-out occurs at higher temperatures compared to the standard case, implying that reproducing the observed abundance requires significantly larger annihilation rates. Here, we point out a completely new phenomenon, which we refer to as relentless dark matter: for large enough values of n, unlike the standard case where annihilation ends shortly after the departure from thermal equilibrium, dark matter particles keep annihilating long after leaving chemical equilibrium, with a significant depletion of the final relic abundance. For the case of dark matter production via freeze-in (a scenario when dark matter interacts very weakly, and is dumped in the early universe out of equilibrium by decay or scattering processes involving particles in the thermal bath) the abundance is dramatically suppressed. We quantitatively and analytically study this phenomenon for three different paradigmatic classes of freeze-in scenarios. For the frozen-in dark matter abundance to be as large as observations, couplings between the dark matter and visible sector particles must be enhanced by several orders of magnitude. This sheds some optimistic prospects for the otherwise dire experimental and observational outlook of detecting dark matter produced by freeze-in.

Finally, the recent discovery of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers has given us a new way to study our universe, but the origin of the black holes binaries remains unclear. We investigate how to use information on the effective spin parameter of binary black hole mergers from the LIGO-Virgo gravitational wave detections to discriminate the origin of the merging black holes. We calculate the expected probability distribution function for the effective spin parameter for primordial black holes. Using LIGO-Virgo observations, we then calculate odds ratios for different models for the distribution of black holes' spin magnitude and alignment. We evaluate the posterior probability density for a possible mixture of astrophysical and primordial black holes as emerging from current data, and calculate the number of future merger events needed to discriminate different spin and alignment models at a given level of statistical significance.

Galaxy clusters are the most massive gravitationally-bound objects in the universe. The bulk of the mass in a cluster is dark matter, while the dominant baryonic component is a thermal, X-ray emitting plasma. Radio observations of diffuse synchrotron emission indicate that galaxy clusters host a population of cosmic rays; however, the nature of this nonthermal component is not well-understood. In this dissertation, I investigate three sources of nonthermal emission in galaxy clusters. The first is star formation in galaxies, which is correlated to gamma-ray emission. I derive lower limits on the gamma-ray emission for nearby clusters by considering the emission from star formation in cluster galaxies. These lower limits sit about an order of magnitude below current upper limits on gamma rays in clusters and will be an important contributor to gamma-ray emission as upper limits improve over time. Dark matter annihilation, which produces relativistic particles that can result in a broad spectrum of emission in cluster environments, is another source of nonthermal emission. I use nondetections and marginal detections of diffuse radio emission in clusters to constrain dark matter annihilation. I derive limits on the annihilation cross section that are competitive with limits from the nondetection of gamma rays in clusters and show that the best objects for study in the radio are different than those in gamma rays, indicating that dark matter searches in the radio can be complementary to searches in other energy bands. I also investigate the cosmic ray population in the merging cluster A2319, which hosts a previously detected radio halo. I present new observations which reveal a two-component radio halo: a 2 Mpc region that extends far past the observable X-ray emission, and an 800 kpc "core" that is bounded by the X-ray cold front. I speculate on the origins of this structure, and show that a hadronic origin for this radio halo is disfavored. Finally, I discuss current ideas and future telescopes that will clarify and deepen our understanding of nonthermal emission in clusters.