WISPy Cold Dark Matter
Abstract
Very weakly interacting slim particles (WISPs), such as axion-like particles (ALPs) or hidden photons (HPs), may be non-thermally produced via the misalignment mechanism in the early universe and survive as a cold dark matter population until today. We find that, both for ALPs and HPs whose dominant interactions with the standard model arise from couplings to photons, a huge region in the parameter spaces spanned by photon coupling and ALP or HP mass can give rise to the observed cold dark matter. Remarkably, a large region of this parameter space coincides with that predicted in well motivated models of fundamental physics. A wide range of experimental searches -- exploiting haloscopes (direct dark matter searches exploiting microwave cavities), helioscopes (searches for solar ALPs or HPs), or light-shining-through-a-wall techniques -- can probe large parts of this parameter space in the foreseeable future.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1201.5902,
title = {WISPy Cold Dark Matter},
author = {Paola Arias and Davide Cadamuro and Mark Goodsell and Joerg Jaeckel and Javier Redondo and Andreas Ringwald},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1201.5902},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
v2: Labels of figure 2 corrected, new text in section 4 added, 29 pages, 4 figures. Final version accepted for publication in JCAP