English

Heavy spin-2 Dark Matter

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-09-28 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We provide further details on a recent proposal addressing the nature of the dark sectors in cosmology and demonstrate that all current observations related to Dark Matter can be explained by the presence of a heavy spin-2 particle. Massive spin-2 fields and their gravitational interactions are uniquely described by ghost-free bimetric theory, which is a minimal and natural extension of General Relativity. In this setup, the largeness of the physical Planck mass is naturally related to extremely weak couplings of the heavy spin-2 field to baryonic matter and therefore explains the absence of signals in experiments dedicated to Dark Matter searches. It also ensures the phenomenological viability of our model as we confirm by comparing it with cosmological and local tests of gravity. At the same time, the spin-2 field possesses standard gravitational interactions and it decays universally into all Standard Model fields but not into massless gravitons. Matching the measured DM abundance together with the requirement of stability constrains the spin-2 mass to be in the 1 to 100 TeV range.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.03497,
  title  = {Heavy spin-2 Dark Matter},
  author = {Eugeny Babichev and Luca Marzola and Martti Raidal and Angnis Schmidt-May and Federico Urban and Hardi Veermäe and Mikael von Strauss},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.03497},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

Latex, 46 pages, 4 figures. Matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:52:48.077Z