Scrutinizing fermionic Dark Matter in scotogenic model with low reheating temperature

Abstract The scotogenic model provides a minimal and elegant framework that simultaneously explains neutrino masses and accommodates a viable dark matter (DM) candidate. In this work, we investigate the phenomenology of fermionic DM in the scotogenic model, with a particular emphasis on the effects of a non-standard cosmological history characterized by a low reheating temperature. We demonstrate that entropy injection from inflaton decay can significantly dilute the DM abundance, thereby relaxing the annihilation cross section required to reproduce the observed relic density and opening new regions of viable parameter space. We further analyze the complementarity between current and future direct detection experiments and charged lepton flavour violation (cLFV) searches in probing this scenario. Our results show that next-generation direct detection experiments such as DARWIN and XLZD, together with upcoming cLFV searches (in particular the future sensitivity of μ → 3 e and μ → e conversion experiments), will be capable of testing substantial regions of the parameter space, including those associated with low reheating temperatures.