Vector Dark Matter from Inflationary Fluctuations
By P. Graham, J. Mardon, S. Rajendran. 2015
401 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We calculate the production of a massive vector boson by quantum fluctuations during inflation. This gives a novel dark-matter production mechanism quite distinct from misalignment or thermal production. While scalars and tensors are typically produced with a nearly scale-invariant spectrum, surprisingly the vector is produced with a power spectrum peaked at intermediate wavelengths. Thus dangerous, long-wavelength, isocurvature perturbations are suppressed. Further, at long wavelengths the vector inherits the usual adiabatic, nearly scale-invariant perturbations of the inflaton, allowing it to be a good dark matter candidate. The final abundance can be calculated precisely from the mass and the Hubble scale of inflation, H_I. Saturating the dark matter abundance we find a prediction for the mass m = 10^-5 eV (10^14 GeV/H_I)^4. High-scale inflation, potentially observable in the CMB, motivates an exciting mass range for recently proposed direct detection experiments for hidden photon dark matter. Such experiments may be able to reconstruct the distinctive, peaked power spectrum, verifying that the dark matter was produced by quantum fluctuations during inflation and providing a direct measurement of the scale of inflation. Thus a detection would not only be the discovery of dark matter, it would also provide an unexpected probe of inflation itself.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72e3368cd9218a1f252829539cfd24bcc9d4bc42
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Citations in the corpus
- Violent preheating in inflation with nonminimal coupling (2016, background): “The same effect leads to a different amount of production of the longitudinal and transverse modes from inflationary quantum fluctuations [28].”
- Production of purely gravitational dark matter: the case of fermion and vector boson (2019, background): “In contrast to the scalar field with minimal coupling, there is a limit for the growth of the superhorizon modes at k ∼ am, and hence such a model is not constrained by the presence of DM isocurvature perturbation on cosmological scales [40].”
- Vector dark matter production at the end of inflation (2018, methodology): “This is in contrast to the longitudinal mode since, as explained in [4], the production via inflationary fluctuations relies on the fact that the Stueckelberg mass is the correct effective description all the way up to the potentially very high scale of inflation.”
- Detection of sub-MeV dark matter with three-dimensional Dirac materials (2017, background): “Such a dark photon can comprise all of the DM, with its relic abundance set via a misalignment mechanism [102,103] or gravitational production [104].”
- Radio for hidden-photon dark matter detection (2014, background): “A more natural mechanism for generating a hidden-photon abundance in the early universe was presented in [45].”
- Gravitational production of vector dark matter (2020, background): “[15], where an instantaneous reheating was assumed, that the power spectrum of longitudinal vector DM density fluctuations falls as k3 for the long-wavelength modes k < k?.”
- Dark photon dark matter produced by axion oscillations (2018, neutral): “An alternative approach relying on quantum fluctuations during inflation can realize DPDM with mA′ > 10 −5 eV [26], but the Stückelberg mass and high scale inflation essential to the mechanism may be in tension with the Weak Gravity Conjecture unless mA′ > 0.”
- The Dark Photon (2020, background): “Production by fluctuations during inflation provides another possibility of having a massive dark photon as dark matter (Graham et al., 2016).”