Ponderomotive Effects of Ultralight Dark Matter

Abstract

I exhibit a new class of quadratic effects of ultralight dark matter. Axions, dark photons, and dilatons can exert rapidly oscillating forces, torques, and mass shifts on Standard Model particles. These effects average to zero at first order, but shift particle properties at second order, in analogy to the ponderomotive force in optics. Remarkably, these effects scale with the square of the amplitude of the dark matter field, even when the field's direct physical effects depend only on its derivatives. I calculate the resulting observables in electron $g_e-2$ experiments using classical mechanics, recovering results previously derived using field theory. When considered properly, these particular experiments do not beat astrophysical bounds, but other precision experiments may have interesting sensitivity.

17 pages

References in corpus (11)

• Primordial Nucleosynthesis: from precision cosmology to fundamental physics
• Dark photon limits: a handbook
• Measurement of the Electron Magnetic Moment
• Earth as a transducer for dark-photon dark-matter detection
• The Phenomenology of Quadratically Coupled Ultra Light Dark Matter
• Positive and negative effective mass of classical particles in oscillatory and static fields
• Constraining Light QCD Axions with Isolated Neutron Star Cooling
• Probing an ultralight QCD axion with electromagnetic quadratic interaction
• Relativistic spin dynamics conditioned by dark matter axions
• Physical Signatures of Fermion-Coupled Axion Dark Matter
• Blowing in the Dark Matter Wind

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Detecting Ultralight Dark Matter with Matter Effect
• INTEGRAL, eROSITA and Voyager Constraints on Light Bosonic Dark Matter: ALPs, Dark Photons, Scalars, $B-L$ and $L_i-L_j$ Vectors