Small-scale structure in vector dark matter

Amin, Mustafa A.; Jain, Mudit; Karur, Rohith; Mocz, Philip

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.11935

Cited by 8 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…It therefore seems natural to add, as a toy model for such interactions, terms in the Lagrangian that are composed of higher-order products of the field. Self-interacting vector fields have also been studied in the context of exotic compact objects, in particular "Proca stars" [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], which may be partly stabilized by a quartic potential [18,19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The problem with Proca: ghost instabilities in self-interacting vector fields

Clough¹,

Helfer²,

Witek³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Massive vector fields feature in several areas of particle physics, e.g., as carriers of weak interactions, dark matter candidates, or as an effective description of photons in a plasma. Here we investigate vector fields with self-interactions by replacing the mass term in the Proca equation with a general potential. We show that this seemingly benign modification inevitably introduces ghost instabilities of the same kind as those recently identified for vector-tensor theories of modified gravity (but in this simpler, minimally coupled theory). It has been suggested that nonperturbative dynamics may drive systems away from such instabilities. We demonstrate that this is not the case by evolving a self-interacting Proca field on a black hole background, where it grows due to the superradiant instability. The system initially evolves as in the massive case, but instabilities are triggered in a finite time once the self-interaction becomes significant. These instabilities have implications for the formation of condensates of massive, self-interacting vector bosons, the possibility of spin-one bosenovae, vector dark matter models, and effective models for interacting photons in a plasma.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The problem with Proca: ghost instabilities in self-interacting vector fields

Clough¹,

Helfer²,

Witek³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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show abstract

“…An interesting aspect of the Stueckelberg dark photon is that it automatically avoids constraints from isocurvature perturbations produced during inflation also predicting effects for structures [21,22]. In realizations through the Higgs mechanism we find that isocurvature constraints are typically re-introduced except if the coupling to curvature is conformal.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…A very attractive feature of the Stueckelberg dark photon is the fact that the power spectrum is peaked at the intermediate scale k * and strongly suppressed on cosmological scales thus avoiding isocurvature constraints from the CMB while predicting deviation from cold dark matter at shorter scales [21,22].…”

Section: Stueckelberg-like Phase: Mmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dark Photon Dark Matter without Stueckelberg Mass

Redi¹,

Tesi²

2022

Preprint

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We study the scenario of dark photon Dark Matter where the mass is generated through the Higgs mechanism rather than the constant Stueckelberg mass. In this construction the dark sector contains necessarily extra degrees of freedom and interactions that lead to non-trivial dynamics including thermalization, phase transitions, cosmic string production. As a consequence the predictions of Stueckelberg theories are vastly modified, strongly depending on the couplings to curvature and on the scale of inflation H I compared to the scale f of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We find in particular that only in extreme regions of parameter space the phenomenology of Stueckelberg dark photon is reproduced. These scenarios are strongly constrained by isocurvature perturbations unless the dark sector is approximately Weyl invariant.

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“…This, together with the Bullet cluster bound (25), gives a large range for the gauge coupling, giving rise to a large range for Chandrasekhar solitons.…”

Section: < L a T E X I T Smentioning

confidence: 95%

“…In particular, there can arise polarized solitons carrying huge intrinsic spin angular momentum [6,23], with rich phenomenological implications owing to this spin polarization. Also very recently, formation and implication of the vector nature of dark matter on small scale structure was explored in [24,25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Yang-Mills stars in Higgsed non-Abelian dark matter

Jain

2022

Preprint

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Bosonic field theories with non-linear interactions alongside gravity, generally admit bound states known as solitons. Depending upon the spin nature of the field, they can even carry macroscopic intrinsic spin polarization. Focusing on the Higgsed SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, we describe polarized solitons in non-Abelian theories with a heavy Higgs, which we refer to as 'Yang-Mills stars'. Owing to both kinds of self-interactions; repulsive ones arising due to the Yang-Mills structure, while attractive ones arising due to the Higgs exchange; we can have a diverse zoo of solitons. Depending upon various parameters of the theory such as the mass of the Yang-Mills vector fields m, mass of the dark Higgs field Mϕ, and the gauge coupling constant g, these objects can be astrophysically large with varying size and mass, and carry large intrinsic spin and/or isospin giving rise to interesting phenomenological implications. Even for vector mass as large as m 10 eV, we can accommodate gauge couplings g 10 −4 − 10 −5 , still evading Bullet cluster constraints. For these parameters, we get astrophysically long lived solitons having radii as large as rs ∼ 10 5 R and masses Ms ∼ 10M , carrying Ms/m ∼ 10 66 amounts of intrinsic spin/isospin polarization.

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Small-scale structure in vector dark matter

Cited by 8 publications

References 44 publications

The problem with Proca: ghost instabilities in self-interacting vector fields

The problem with Proca: ghost instabilities in self-interacting vector fields

Dark Photon Dark Matter without Stueckelberg Mass

Yang-Mills stars in Higgsed non-Abelian dark matter

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