Kinetic Mixing of the Photon with Hidden U(1)s in String Phenomenology

By S. Abel, M. Goodsell, J. Jaeckel, V. Khoze, A. Ringwald. 2008

330 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Embeddings of the standard model in type II string theory typically contain a variety of U(1) gauge factors arising from D-branes in the bulk. In general, there is no reason why only one of these - the one corresponding to weak hypercharge - should be massless. Observations require that standard model particles must be neutral (or have an extremely small charge) under additional massless U(1)s, i.e. the latter have to belong to a so called hidden sector. The exchange of heavy messengers, however, can lead to a kinetic mixing between the hypercharge and the hidden-sector U(1)s, that is testable with near future experiments. This provides a powerful probe of the hidden sectors and, as a consequence, of the string theory realisation itself. In the present paper, we show, using a variety of methods, how the kinetic mixing can be derived from the underlying type II string compactification, involving supersymmetric and nonsupersymmetric configurations of D-branes, both in large volumes and in warped backgrounds with fluxes. We first demonstrate by explicit example that kinetic mixing occurs in a completely supersymmetric set-up where we can use conformal field theory techniques. We then develop a supergravity approach which allows us to examine the phenomenon in more general backgrounds, where we find that kinetic mixing is natural in the context of flux compactifications. We discuss the phenomenological consequences for experiments at the low-energy frontier, searching for signatures of light, sub-electronvolt or even massless hidden-sector U(1) gauge bosons and minicharged particles.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48297f53c885bb03a3485e79943da44f2254f4ce

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. A. Ringwald
2. J. Redondo
3. Lavinia Heisenberg
4. K. Zurek
5. P. Graham
6. R. Essig
7. J. Mardon
8. S. Rajendran

Citations in the corpus

• Constraining light dark matter with low-energy e+e− colliders (2013, neutral): “[38–55] and references therein.”
• Abelian hidden sectors at a GeV (2009, background): “Conversely, the kinetic mixing parameter ǫ can be highly suppressed or absent if there exist no such bi-fundamentals, if the underlying gauge structure consists of a simple group, or in the context of certain string-theoretic constructions [54, 55].”
• Indications for a pair-production anomaly from the propagation of VHE gamma-rays (2012, background): “In the context of propagation of unpolarized energetic photons, a number of processes have been suggested to modify the standard model behaviour: The pair production process could be affected by Lorentz-invariance violation (LIV) processes [11, 12], kinematic mixing with hidden sector photons [13], ”
• Radio for hidden-photon dark matter detection (2014, background): “[23] S.”
• Microwave Background Constraints on Mixing of Photons with Hidden Photons (2008, background): “Typical predicted values for the mixing angle �0 in realistic string compactifications range between 10−16 and 10−2 [21] (see also [22, 23 ]).”
• Vector Dark Matter from Inflationary Fluctuations (2015, background): “[32] S.”
• Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “In string theory, such hidden U(1)s and the required kinetic mixing are a generic feature [5, 4, 311, 6, 402].”
• Any Light Particle Search II -- Technical Design Report (2013, background): “, degrees of freedom arising from string extensions [44, 47, 45].”
• Massive hidden photons as lukewarm dark matter (2008, neutral): “Typical predicted values for χ 0 range between 10−16 and 10−2 [33–36].”
• Probing dark forces and light hidden sectors at low-energy e+e- colliders (2009, background): “dard Model hypercharge [29, 30], ∆L = ǫY FY,µνFD µν. (1) Several high-scale mechanisms, summarized below, generate ǫY ∼ 10−6 −10−2 (we note that from string theory the range for ǫY can be even larger [31]). Therefore, the setup illustrated in Figure 1 is generic if there is any new gauge group conta”
• Testing string vacua in the lab: from a hidden CMB to dark forces in flux compactifications (2011, background): “We shall argue that this is indeed the case in a variety of string models based on type IIB flux compactifications on Calabi-Yau orientifolds with D3/D7-branes and O3/O7-planes [8, 10], unlike for example the heterotic case [3, 11] where there is no natural way to suppress the mixing and masses.”
• Dark light, dark matter, and the misalignment mechanism (2011, background): “Amongst some of the less canonical candidates lie several variants of light massive vector particles [1–3].”