Bosonic super-WIMPs as keV-scale dark matter

By M. Pospelov, A. Ritz, M. Voloshin. 2008

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We consider models of light superweakly interacting cold dark matter, with O(10-100) keV mass, focusing on bosonic candidates such as pseudoscalars and vectors. We analyze the cosmological abundance, the {gamma} background created by particle decays, the impact on stellar processes due to cooling, and the direct-detection capabilities in order to identify classes of models that pass all the constraints. In certain models, variants of photoelectric (or axioelectric) absorption of dark matter in direct-detection experiments can provide a sensitivity to the superweak couplings to the standard model which is superior to all existing indirect constraints. In all models studied, the annual modulation of the direct-detection signal is at the currently unobservable level of O(10{sup -5})

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1755c3a8a5e653326b322a582efc3b32d09bec88

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Citations in the corpus

Solar constraints on hidden photons re-visited (2013, background): “HP production in the early universe can be quite efficient despite the small couplings, which makes them excellent candidates for dark matter [7–10] and dark radiation [11] in different parameter ranges.”
The Dawn of FIMP Dark Matter: A Review of Models and Constraints (2017, background): “If the dark photon is light, mA < 2me, as required by stability, then the DM abundance can be produced by the freeze-in mechanism through photon scattering with electrons and positrons or through electron-positron annihilation [332, 333].”
Spin-independent elastic WIMP scattering and the DAMA annual modulation signal (2008, background): “10GeV masses [7–9], keV scale axion-like dark matter [10] (see however, [11, 12]), dark matter interacting only with electrons [13], inelastic WIMP scattering [14, 15] and mirror dark matter [16].”
Revisiting Supernova 1987A constraints on dark photons (2016, methodology): “Using the width calculated in the Euler-Heisenberg effective theory [47] and the model-independent bounds of diffuse X-ray background in [49] for a decay to two photons, which we multiply by 3/2 to account for the increased multiplicity in this model and rescale by the abundance from resonant produc”
DARWIN: towards the ultimate dark matter detector (2016, background): “By exploiting the axio-electric effect [57, 58], DARWIN can search for galactic and solar axions.”
Solar axion flux from the axion-electron coupling (2013, background): “However, that calculation included K-shell recombination only and employed cross sections with excessive screening which were additionally underestimated by a factor 1/2 recently pointed by Pospelov, Ritz and Voloshin [76] (see also [82]).”
Dark radiation constraints on minicharged particles in models with a hidden photon (2013, background): “HPs are also thermally produced in the early Universe, the relic population behaving as dark matter [48, 49] or dark radiation [50] depending on its mass (100 keV or meV respectively)1.”
Massive hidden photons as lukewarm dark matter (2008, background): “[26] also discuss the possibility of hidden photons as dark matter.”
The Dark Photon (2020, background): “(34) This scenario is made accessible to the experiments by considering the rate of absorption of the dark photon by the detector (Bloch et al., 2017; Pospelov et al., 2008): ΓA′ = ρA′ mA′ σA′vA′ , (35) where the density ρA′ is estimated from the relic density (or the flux from the Sun).”
The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, unknown): “For nonrelativistic electrons and ultrarelativistic axions, the cross section for the axio-electric effect is proportional to the photoelectric cross section [457–459]”