Parametric resonance production of ultralight vector dark matter

By J. Dror, K. Harigaya, V. Narayan. Physical Review D, 2018

169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Vector bosons heavier than $10^{-22}$ eV can be viable dark matter candidates with distinctive experimental signatures. Ultralight dark matter generally requires a non-thermal origin to achieve the observed density, while still behaving like a pressureless fluid at late times. We show that such a production mechanism naturally occurs for vectors whose mass originates from a dark Higgs. If the dark Higgs has a large field value after inflation, the energy in the Higgs field can be efficiently transferred to vectors through parametric resonance. Computing the resulting abundance and spectra requires careful treatment of the transverse and longitudinal components, whose dynamics are governed by distinct differential equations. We study these equations in detail and find that the mass of the vector may be as low as $10 ^{ - 18 }$ eV, while making up the dominant dark matter abundance. This opens up a wide mass range of vector dark matter as cosmologically viable, further motivating their experimental search.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/190baca65f470ca3162fa1d3af0532c152e2c721

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. R. Vega-Morales
2. M. Bastero-Gil
3. J. Santiago
4. Lorenzo Ubaldi

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. R. Vega-Morales
2. M. Bastero-Gil
3. J. Santiago
4. Lorenzo Ubaldi

Citations in the corpus

• Dark photon dark matter produced by axion oscillations (2018, unknown): “[39, 60, 61] which also consider new production mechanisms for light vector dark matter.”
• Gravitational production of vector dark matter (2020, background): “[18–21] for the latter case.”
• Vector dark matter production at the end of inflation (2018, background): “Vector production can also occur during the oscillations of a dark Higgs which gives a mass to the dark photon [36].”