Dark Photon Dark Matter without Stueckelberg Mass

Abstract

We study the scenario of dark photon Dark Matter where the mass is generated through the Higgs mechanism rather than the constant Stueckelberg mass. In this construction the dark sector contains necessarily extra degrees of freedom and interactions that lead to non-trivial dynamics including thermalization, phase transitions, cosmic string production. As a consequence the predictions of Stueckelberg theories are vastly modified, strongly depending on the couplings to curvature and on the scale of inflation $H_I$ compared to the scale $f$ of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We find in particular that only in extreme regions of parameter space the phenomenology of Stueckelberg dark photon is reproduced. These scenarios are strongly constrained by isocurvature perturbations unless the dark sector is approximately Weyl invariant.

29 pages, 4 figures. v2) refs added, typos fixed, section 4.2 improved, conclusions unchanged

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• Cosmologically Varying Kinetic Mixing
• Experimental targets for dark photon dark matter
• Swampland Bounds on Dark Sectors
• Gravitationally produced Dark Matter and primordial black holes
• Misalignment production of vector boson dark matter from axion-SU(2) inflation
• Prospects on the Detection of Solar Dark Photons by the International Axion Observatory
• Complex Dark Photon Dark Matter EFT
• Jump Starting the Dark Sector with a Phase Transition
• $A^{\prime }$ view of the sunrise: Boosting helioscopes with angular information
• Amplifying Non-Resonant Production of Dark Sector Particles in Scattering Dominance Regime
• Vector dark matter production during inflation in the gradient-expansion formalism
• Plausible constraints and inflationary production for dark photons
• Dark photon dark matter constraints at the Taiwan axion search experiment with haloscope