English

Taming the dark photon production via a non-minimal coupling to gravity

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-01-28 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Inflationary production of massive dark photons with non-minimal couplings to gravity shows surprising growth at large momenta. These couplings appear in the effective low energy description of a more fundamental theory. We find that the growth is absent in explicit gauge invariant UV-complete models. Such completions are also free of "ghost" instabilities, which often appear in the effective models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.12309,
  title  = {Taming the dark photon production via a non-minimal coupling to gravity},
  author = {Oleg Lebedev and Jong-Hyun Yoon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.12309},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Physics Letters B