A family of WISPy dark matter candidates

Abstract

Dark matter made from non-thermally produced bosons can have very low, possibly sub-eV masses. Axions and hidden photons are prominent examples of such "dark" very weakly interacting light (slim) particles (WISPs). A suitable mechanism for their non-thermal production is the misalignment mechanism. Their dominant interaction with Standard Model (SM) particles is via photons. In this note we want to go beyond these standard examples and discuss a wide range of scalar and pseudo-scalar bosons interacting with SM matter fermions via derivative interactions. Suitably light candidates arise naturally as pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons. In particular we are interested in examples, inspired by familons, whose interactions have a non-trivial flavor structure.

Misalignment & Co.: (pseudo-)scalar and vector dark matter with curvature couplings

“…Light scalars or vectors very weakly coupled to the Standard Model are phenomenologically and experimentally interesting dark matter candidates [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] (cf. also [8] for a recent review).…”

Chiral Froggatt-Nielsen models, gauge anomalies and flavourful axions

“…We thus conclude that one needs at least one spectator with a non-zero hypercharge, which would in turn make the running of the hypercharge coupling a bit steeper than it was in the chiral model 13 . 12 The bound could also increase due to contributions of the other gauge couplings. 13 This conclusion might be evaded, and the running brought back to the one of the chiral model, by relaxing some of the assumptions we made, for instance if one starts using both singlets to generate the mass matrices, contrary to what we assumed here.…”

“…Their study has recently been revived by the focus on flavourful axions which arise in FN-like setups [5][6][7][8] and whose EFT is very much constrained by flavour physics [9][10][11]. Such flavourful axions can also be linked with dark matter studies [12].…”

“…12) and SU (5)-like unification as in(3.11). Assuming that the charges of the MSSM particles are the same as in model B and that the Yukawa couplings are all expressed in terms of the same singlet, then normalizing all the U (1) FN charges such that the Yukawa couplings have natural integer charges (i.e.…”

The quest for an intermediate-scale accidental axion and further ALPs

“…There is also a theoretical motivation for the existence of additional axion-like particles (ALPs) (for reviews, see [50][51][52]), emerging as pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons from the breaking of other global symmetries, such as lepton number [53,54] or family symmetries [55][56][57]. Most notably, the low-energy effective field theories emerging from string theory generically contain candidates for the axion plus possibly a multitude of additional ALPs.…”