Related papers: Dark Radiation from a hidden U(1)
We compute the thermalization of a hidden sector consisting of minicharged fermions (MCPs) and massless hidden photons in the early Universe. The precise measurement of the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by Planck and…
Dark sector particles with small electric charge, or millicharge, (mCPs) may lead to a variety of diverse phenomena in particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Assuming their possible existence, we investigate the accumulation and…
New light species can contribute to the number of effective relativistic degrees of freedom ($N_{\rm eff}$) at Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) which is precisely measured by Planck. In this work, we consider an MeV scale thermally…
We update dark radiation constraints on millicharged particle (MCP) and gauged baryon-number-minus-lepton-number ($B-L$) extensions of the Standard Model (SM). In these models, a massive SM gauge singlet mediator couples the SM plasma to…
Minicharged particles (mCPs), hypothetical free particles with effective electric charges much smaller than the elementary charge, $e$, offer a valuable probe of dark sectors and fundamental physics through several clear experimental…
We propose a novel idea to discover millicharged particles (mCPs) captured by the earth during its existence. It has been demonstrated that the mCPs accumulation inside the earth leads to the enhancement of its number density much larger…
Recent cosmological data have provided evidence for a "dark" relativistic background at high statistical significance. Parameterized in terms of the number of relativistic degrees of freedom Neff, however, the current data seems to indicate…
We investigate the impact of millicharged particles (MCPs) on massive stars undergoing pulsational pair-instability supernovae and on the location of the lower edge of the black hole mass gap. We find that energy losses due to MCP emission…
Dark sectors provide a compelling theoretical framework for thermally producing sub-GeV dark matter, and motivate an expansive new accelerator and direct-detection experimental program. We demonstrate the power of constraining such dark…
Dark matter sectors with hidden interactions have been of much interest in recent years. These frameworks include models of millicharged particles as well as dark sector bound states, whose constituents have electromagnetic gauge…
We study the possibility that a keV-MeV mass hidden photon (HP), i.e. a hidden sector U(1) gauge boson, accounts for the observed amount of dark matter. We focus on the case where the HP interacts with the standard model sector only through…
We calculate the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy spectrum in models with millicharged particles of electric charge q\sim 10^{-6}-10^{-1} in units of electron charge. We find that a large region of the parameter space for the…
We explore the cosmological consequences of kinetically mixed dark photons with a mass between 1 MeV and 10 GeV, and an effective electromagnetic fine structure constant as small as $10^{-38}$. We calculate the freeze-in abundance of these…
Dark matter (DM) charged under a dark U(1) force appears in many extensions of the Standard Model, and has been invoked to explain anomalies in cosmic-ray data, as well as a self-interacting DM candidate. In this paper, we perform a…
In this work we explore the intriguing connections between searches for long-lived particles (LLPs) at the LHC and early universe cosmology. We study the non-thermal production of ultra-relativistic particles (i.e. dark radiation) in the…
If the hidden sector contains more than one U(1) groups, additional dim-4 couplings (beyond the kinetic mixing) between the massive U(1) fields and the hypercharge generally appear. These are of the form similar to the Chern-Simons…
Recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) results from the Planck satellite, combined with previous CMB data and Hubble constant measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope, provide a constraint on the effective number of relativistic…
If the dark sector exists and communicates with Standard Model through the $U(1)$ mixing, it is possible that electromagnetism would have influence on matter fields in dark sector, so-called millicharge particles (mCPs). Furthermore, the…
The relic abundance of light millicharged particles (MCPs) with the electric charge $e' = 5\cdot 10^{-5} e$ and with the mass slightly below or above the electron mass is calculated. The abundance depends on the mass ratio $\eta=m_X/m_e$…
New measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by the Planck mission have greatly increased our knowledge about the Universe. Dark radiation, a weakly interacting component of radiation, is one of the important ingredients in our…