Related papers: Dark Photon Dark Matter from Cosmic Strings and Gr…
Motivated by various kinds of new physics models, a new light neutral vector boson (the dark photon) connected to the Standard Model of particle physics only through the kinetic mixing with the U(1)_Y factor has been studied extensively.…
Too light primordial black holes evaporate and are therefore strongly constrained by various bounds, e.g. Cosmic Microwave Background distortion. However, if they are formed strongly clustered, the corresponding haloes may collapse in…
The nature of dark matter, the invisible substance making up over $80\%$ of the matter in the Universe, is one of the most fundamental mysteries of modern physics. Ultralight bosons such as axions, axion-like particles or dark photons could…
Dark photons are a well-motivated candidate for dark matter, but their detection becomes challenging for ultralight masses with both experimental and astrophysical probes. In this work, we propose a new approach to explore this regime…
We consider the simplest possibility for a model of particle dark matter in which dark matter has only gravitational interaction with the standard model sector. Even in such a case, it is known that the gravitational particle production in…
Starting with the de Broglie--Proca Lagrangian for a massive vector field, we calculate the number density of particles resulting from gravitational particle production (GPP) during inflation, with detailed consideration to the evolution of…
Black hole superradiance, which only relies on gravitational interactions, can provide a powerful probe of the existence of ultralight bosons that are weakly coupled to ordinary matter. However, as a boson cloud grows through superradiance,…
Dark matter (DM) refers to a new type of matter that may explain observed rotation curves of galaxies and the composite structure of the Universe. It may couple to the Standard Model particles via portals, which include the possibility of…
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are a compelling candidate for dark matter (DM), whose production is associated with the formation of a string-wall network. If walls bounded by strings persist, which requires the potential to have multiple…
Cosmic strings can arise in hidden sector models with a spontaneously broken Abelian symmetry group. We have studied the couplings of the Standard Model fields to these so-called dark strings in the companion paper. Here we survey the…
The axion or axion-like particle motivated from a natural solution of strong CP problem or string theory is a promising dark matter candidate. We study the new observational effects of ultralight axion-like particles by the space-borne…
Pre--big bang models of inflation based on string cosmology produce a stochastic gravitational wave background whose spectrum grows with decreasing wavelength, and which may be detectable using interferometers such as LIGO. We point out…
Gravitational effects are known to violate global symmetries, threatening the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) solution to the strong CP problem. Ultraviolet completions featuring a gauged $U(1)$ symmetry, where $U(1)_{\rm PQ}$ arises as an accidental…
Dark matter (DM) is a new type of invisible matter introduced to explain various features of recent astrophysical observations, including galaxy rotation curves and other fundamental characteristics of our universe. DM may couple to…
We consider inelastic dark matter scenarios with dark photon mediator and a dark Higgs boson. The dark Higgs boson spontaneously breaks the gauge symmetry associated with the dark photon, and gives the mass to the dark photon and the mass…
We investigate a scenario where the dark matter of the Universe is made from very light hidden photons transforming under a $Z_{2}$-symmetry. In contrast to the usual situation, kinetic mixing is forbidden by the symmetry and the dark…
We study the deflection of light in the background of a "wiggly" cosmic string, and investigate whether it is possible to detect cosmic strings by means of weak gravitational lensing. For straight strings without small-scale structure there…
Light new vector bosons can be produced gravitationally through quantum fluctuations during inflation; if these particles are feebly coupled and cosmologically metastable, they can account for the observed dark matter abundance. However, in…
An interesting possibility for dark matter is a scalar particle of mass of order 10 MeV-1 GeV, interacting with a U(1) gauge boson (dark photon) which mixes with the photon. We present a simple and natural model realizing this possibility.…
Generic constraints on dark photons are generally presented assuming they have Stueckelberg masses. These constraints are strengthened if instead the mass is due to the Higgs mechanism and the dark Higgs is light. First, we show that under…