Dark photon dark matter and fast radio bursts
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Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Dark photon dark matter and fast radio bursts Ricardo G. Landima Physik Department T70, Technische Universität München, James-Franck-Straße 1, 85748 Garching, Germany
Received: 21 May 2020 / Accepted: 25 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The nature of dark matter (DM) is still a mystery that may indicate the necessity for extensions of the Standard Model (SM). Light dark photons (DP) may comprise partially or entirely the observed DM density and existing limits for the DP DM parameter space arise from several cosmological and astrophysical sources. In the present work we investigate DP DM using cosmic transients, specifically fast radio bursts (FRBs). The observed time delay of radio photons with different energies have been used to constrain the photon mass or the Weak Equivalence Principle, for example. Due to the mixing between the visible and the DP, the time delay of photons from these cosmic transients, caused by free electrons in the intergalactic medium, can change and impact those constraints from FRBs. We use five detected FRBs and two associations of FRBs with gamma-ray bursts to investigate the correspondent variation on the time delay caused by the presence of DP DM. The result is virtually independent of the FRB used and this variation is very small, considering the still allowed DP DM parameter space, not jeopardizing current bounds on other contributions of the observed time delay.
1 Introduction Dark matter (DM) is one the biggest puzzles in cosmology, and lately in particles physics, whose existence is a hint for physics beyond the standard model (SM). Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) have been the most well-known DM candidates (see Ref. [1] for a review), but the lack of positive signatures opens new avenues of exploration. Among several extensions of the SM, a new U (1) gauge field was proposed as mediator of the interaction between DM and SM particles [2–15]. The so-called ‘dark photon’ (DP) interacts with the visible sector through the kinetic-mixing with the a e-mail:
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hypercharge field1 √ ε 2 Fμν F μν [17–25]. Its parameter 2 1+ε space has been constrained through plenty of observations and experiments [5,26–48], and has led to theoretical explanations for the (expected) smallness of the kinetic-mixing parameter [19,49–54]. One of the DM candidates is a very light DP, whose viable production mechanisms have been investigated over the years [55–68]. Several cosmological and astrophysical constraints are applied to DP DM, arising from the on-shell and off-shell (resonant and non-resonant) transition between DP and SM photons [59,69,70], the non-resonant absorption of DP and subsequent heating of Milky Way’s interstellar medium [16], the heating/cooling of the Leo T dwarf galaxy [71], the heating of cold gas clouds [72], the Ly-α forest [73], CMB spectral distortions [69,74], heating of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at the epoch of helium reionization, the depl
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