Runaway Gravitational Production of Dark Photons

Abstract

We demonstrate that gravitational particle production (GPP) of a massive, Abelian, vector (Proca) field during inflation in the presence of nonminimal coupling to gravity may suffer from an instability which leads to runaway production of high-momentum modes. This is untenable unless there is some mechanism to regulate the runaway. We discuss the parameter space of the particle mass and nonminimal couplings where such a runaway occurs and possible ways to tame the runaway. We find that there is no obvious way to resolve the runaway in a UV completion or with kinetic mixing to the standard model.

arXiv comment6 pages, 2 figures

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• Unified view of scalar and vector dark matter solitons
• Estimation of gravitational production uncertainties
• Black hole destabilization via trapped quasi-normal modes
• Vector dark matter production during inflation in the gradient-expansion formalism
• Non-minimally coupled quintessential inflation
• Cosmology of Gravi-Axions