Abstract
Despite growing interest and extensive effort to search for ultralight dark matter in the form of a hypothetical dark photon, how it fits into a consistent cosmology is unclear. Several dark photon dark matter production mechanisms proposed previously are known to have limitations, at least in certain mass regimes of experimental interest. In this letter, we explore a novel mechanism, where a coherently oscillating axion-like field can efficiently transfer its energy density to a dark photon field via a tachyonic instability. The residual axion relic is subsequently depleted via couplings to the visible sector, leaving only the dark photon as dark matter. We ensure that the cosmologies of both the axion and dark photon are consistent with existing constraints. We find that the mechanism works for a broad range of dark photon masses, including those of interest for ongoing experiments and proposed detection techniques.
Highlights
The identity of dark matter remains unknown
Recent years have seen a growing interest in experimental techniques for detecting light dark photon dark matter (DPDM), and many ideas have been studied. These include microwave cavity experiments such as ADMX [1], a dark matter radio [2], dish antennas [3,4,5,6,7,8], dielectric haloscopes [9], absorption in various targets [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18], the use of dark matter detectors as helioscopes [19], and the repurposing of gravitational wave detectors [20] as well as other accelerometers [21]. All these techniques focus on DPDM with masses ≲keV, in which case it must be produced nonthermally to avoid constraints on warm dark matter [22,23]
In this paper we study a novel possibility, in which energy stored in coherent oscillations of an axionlike field φ can be efficiently transferred to A0 via a so-called tachyonic instability
Summary
The identity of dark matter remains unknown. One candidate is a dark photon A0, a novel gauge boson with an unknown mass and tiny coupling to the Standard Model (SM). Recent years have seen a growing interest in experimental techniques for detecting light dark photon dark matter (DPDM), and many ideas have been studied These include microwave cavity experiments such as ADMX [1], a dark matter radio [2], dish antennas [3,4,5,6,7,8], dielectric haloscopes [9], absorption in various targets [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18], the use of dark matter detectors as helioscopes [19], and the repurposing of gravitational wave detectors [20] as well as other accelerometers [21].
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