Freeze-in at Low Reheating and Direct Detection of Fermion Dark Matter

We investigate a low-reheating-temperature freeze-in scenario within a minimal model of fermionic dark matter interacting through a pseudoscalar mediator. In this setup, dark matter is produced via the decay of the pseudoscalar, which remains in thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model bath. We derive the thermalization and non-thermalization conditions for the new fields and obtain the corresponding direct-detection constraints and projections on the model based on LZ and DARWIN experiments, respectively.