New Light and Heavy Matter States and Their Role in Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract

Many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, in particular scenarios based on supergravity or superstrings, predict a hidden sector of new particles interacting only very weakly with Standard Model particles. Such scenarios do not necessarily only contain Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs ), new heavy states at the GeV-TeV scale and above some of which are candidates for the dark matter, but often also predict Weakly Interacting Sub-eV (or Slim) Particles (WISPs) that can couple to the photon field \(A_\mu \) [926]. The most well-known examples include pseudo-scalar axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) a and hidden photons that mix kinetically with photons. At the high end of the mass spectrum various particle physics models also predict the existence of non-elementary particle states that can be either one-dimensional topological defects such as monopoles or non-topological solitons such as condensations of bosonic states and so-called Q-balls . The particle physics aspects of many of these objects have been introduced in Chap. 2. In the present chapter we discuss them further and review some of their possible astrophysical and cosmological effects.