Dark QED from inflation
Asimina Arvanitaki (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 2Y5, Canada); Savas Dimopoulos (Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA); Marios Galanis (Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA); Davide Racco (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 2Y5, Canada); Olivier Simon (Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA); et al - Show all 6 authors
One contribution to any dark sector’s abundance comes from its gravitational production during inflation. If the dark sector is weakly coupled to the inflaton and the Standard Model, this can be its only production mechanism. For non-interacting dark sectors, such as a free massive fermion or a free massive vector field, this mechanism has been studied extensively. In this paper we show, via the example of dark massive QED, that the presence of interactions can result in a vastly different mass for the dark matter (DM) particle, which may well coincide with the range probed by upcoming experiments.
