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Dark Photon Decay Beyond The Euler-Heisenberg Limit

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2018-05-02 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We calculate the exact width for a dark photon decaying to three photons at one loop order for dark photon masses m' below the e+e- production threshold of 2m_e. We find substantial deviations from previous results derived from the lowest order Euler-Heisenberg effective Lagrangian in the range m_e < m' < 2m_e, where higher order terms in the derivative expansion are nonnegligible. This mass range is precisely where the three photon decay takes place on cosmologically relevant timescales. Our improved analysis opens a window for dark photons in the range 850 keV < m' < 2m_e, 10^-5 < epsilon < 10^-4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.00619,
  title  = {Dark Photon Decay Beyond The Euler-Heisenberg Limit},
  author = {Samuel D. McDermott and Hiren H. Patel and Harikrishnan Ramani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.00619},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

6 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:33:00.899Z