Dark Matter Freeze Out during an Early Cosmological Period of QCD Confinement

Standard lore states that there is tension between the need to accommodate the relic density of a weakly interacting massive particle and direct searches for dark matter. However, the estimation of the relic density rests on an extrapolation of the cosmology of the early Universe to the time of freeze out, untethered by observations. We explore a nonstandard cosmology in which the strong coupling constant evolves in the early Universe, triggering an early period of QCD confinement at the time of freeze out. We find that depending on the nature of the interactions between the dark matter and the Standard Model, freeze out during an early period of confinement can lead to drastically different expectations for the relic density, allowing for regions of parameter space which realize the correct abundance but would otherwise be excluded by direct searches.