Cosmological Relaxation through the Dark Axion Portal
arXiv:2108.11295 · doi:10.1007/JHEP07(2022)126
Abstract
The dark axion portal is a coupling of an axion-like particle to a dark photon kinetically mixed with the visible photon. We show how this portal, when applied to the relaxion, can lead to cosmological relaxation of the weak scale using dark photon production. The key backreaction mechanism involves the Schwinger effect: As long as electroweak symmetry is unbroken, Schwinger production of massless Standard Model fermions, which carry dark millicharges, suppresses the dark photon production. Once the electroweak symmetry is broken, the fermions acquire mass and the suppression is lifted. An enhanced dark photon dissipation then traps the relaxion at a naturally small weak scale. Our model thus provides a novel link between the phenomenological dark axion portal, dark photons, and the hierarchy problem of the Higgs mass.
36 pages, 9 figures. Matches published version
References in corpus (21)
- Dark photon limits: a handbook
- N-flationary magnetic fields
- A Clockwork Theory
- Stellar Recipes for Axion Hunters
- Signatures of a hidden cosmic microwave background
- Relaxation from particle production
- Primordial Deuterium after LUNA: concordances and error budget
- The Impact of New d(p,γ)He3 Rates on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
- Chiral Anomaly, Schwinger Effect, Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian, and application to axion inflation
- Portal Connecting Dark Photons and Axions
- Gravitational Waves and Dark Photon Dark Matter from Axion Rotations
- Self-Organised Localisation
- No evidence for axions from Chandra observation of magnetic white dwarf
- Thermalized Axion Inflation
- Constraints on Relaxion Windows
- An Axion-induced SM/MSSM Higgs Landscape and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
- Sliding Naturalness
- Gravitational Wave Echo of Relaxion Trapping
- Supernova constraints on an axion-photon-dark photon interaction
- New searches at the reactor experiments based on the dark axion portal
- Runaway Relaxion from Finite Density
Cited by in corpus (12)
- Gauge-field production during axion inflation in the gradient expansion formalism
- A Leptonic ALP Portal to the Dark Sector
- Cosmologically Varying Kinetic Mixing
- Axion dark matter from frictional misalignment
- On the Schwinger effect during axion inflation
- Attracting the Electroweak Scale to a Tachyonic Trap
- Chirality production during axion inflation
- Freezing-in the Pure Dark Axion Portal
- Dark axion portal at boson factories
- Gauge hierarchy and metastability from Higgs-driven crunching
- Supercooled Audible Axions
- Probing the Axion-Photon-Dark Photon Interaction at Future Colliders