WISPy cold dark matter

By P. Arias, Davide Cadamuro, M. Goodsell, J. Jaeckel, J. Redondo, A. Ringwald. 2012

909 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Very weakly interacting slim particles (WISPs), such as axion-like particles (ALPs) or hidden photons (HPs), may be non-thermally produced via the misalignment mechanism in the early universe and survive as a cold dark matter population until today. We nd that, both for ALPs and HPs whose dominant interactions with the standard model arise from couplings to photons, a huge region in the parameter spaces spanned by photon coupling and ALP or HP mass can give rise to the observed cold dark matter. Remarkably, a large region of this parameter space coincides with that predicted in well motivated models of fundamental physics. A wide range of experimental searches { exploiting haloscopes (direct dark matter searches exploiting microwave cavities), helioscopes (searches for solar ALPs or HPs), or light-shining-through-a-wall techniques { can probe large parts of this parameter space in the foreseeable future.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/527fa36c7056834016a15c8bc5b480f547510c90

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Citations in the corpus

Vector dark matter production at the end of inflation (2018, background): “They can be produced via the misalignment mechanism like axions [2], though only if they couple non-minimally to gravity [3].”
The type IIB string axiverse and its low-energy phenomenology (2012, background): “B.2 Cosmic axions B.2.1 Dark matter The QCD axion [72–74] and more generally ALPs [6, 19, 22, 75, 76] may constitute populations of cold dark matter (CDM), produced non-thermally via the misalignment 13There are also other hints of signals for ALPs in other parameter regions, for example in [70, 71]”
Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules (2017, background): “B.5) could conceivably constitute a substantial fraction of the DM (Arias et al., 2012; Foot and Vagnozzi, 2015; Nelson and Scholtz, 2011).”
Vector Dark Matter from Inflationary Fluctuations (2015, background): “However, [12] was focussed on preserving a dark matter abundance of these vector bosons produced by the misalignment mechanism, wherein the field is generically assumed to have a non-zero initial value prior to inflation.”
Dark photon limits: A handbook (2021, background): “[39, 121] (the same upper limit as shown in Fig.”
Sensitivity projections for dark matter searches with the Fermi large area telescope (2016, background): “For an axion or ALPmaking up a fraction Ωa/Ω of the total DM, these requirements lead to an upper limit on the photon coupling in terms of the mass [51],”
Cool WISPs for stellar cooling excesses (2015, background): “Besides being able to explain the stellar cooling anomalies, as we shall discuss further in this section, and being dark matter candidates [68], light ALPs have been invoked to explain other astrophysical anomalies, such as the seeming transparency of the universe to very high energy (TeV) gamma ray”
Recent Progress in the Physics of Axions and Axion-Like Particles (2020, background): “Taking the simple harmonic approximation for the axion potential, the resulting axion dark matter abundance turns out to be [14]”
Factoring the strong CP problem (2017, background): “Cosmology constraints The yellow region is ruled out by a combination of cosmological constraints, assuming that the reheat temperature was sufficiently high to produce an equilibrium thermal population of axions [55] which dominates over misalignment production in this region [56].”
Dark photon dark matter produced by axion oscillations (2018, neutral): “[19, 25], from a resonant conversion to SM photons.”