Hunting for Dark Photon-Photon Tridents

Abstract

Dark photons, hypothesized to be sufficiently light and/or weakly interacting, offer a compelling candidate for dark matter. Their decay into three photons, referred to as the "dark photon trident" process, becomes the dominant channel when the dark photon mass lies below the electron pair production threshold. This decay channel produces a significant flux of x-rays, presenting an opportunity for indirect detection. In this study, we analyze 16 years of x-ray data from INTEGRAL/SPI to investigate sub-MeV dark photon decay. By incorporating state-of-the-art astrophysical background modeling and accounting for the full one-loop decay amplitude, we achieve world-leading constraints on the kinetic mixing parameter for dark photon masses in the range of 61-1022 keV. These results represent a significant improvement over previous constraints, narrowing the parameter space for viable dark photon dark matter models. Furthermore, our findings highlight the potential of x-ray observatories to probe unexplored regions of parameter space and pave the way for future searches using next-generation instruments designed to detect faint astrophysical signals.

Contribution to the 2nd Training School of the COST Action COSMIC WISPers (CA21106). To be published in Proceedings of Science

References in corpus (5)

• Dark photon limits: a handbook
• Bounds on Long-lived Dark Matter Mediators from Neutron Stars
• Constraints on light decaying dark matter candidates from 16 years of INTEGRAL/SPI observations
• Indirect Searches for Dark Photon-Photon Tridents in Celestial Objects
• Strong Constraints on Dark Photon and Scalar Dark Matter Decay from INTEGRAL and AMS-02 data

Cited by in corpus (4)

• X-Ray Constraints on Dark Photon Tridents
• Strong Constraints on Dark Photon and Scalar Dark Matter Decay from INTEGRAL and AMS-02 data
• Sub-keV dark matter can strongly ionize molecular clouds
• INTEGRAL, eROSITA and Voyager Constraints on Light Bosonic Dark Matter: ALPs, Dark Photons, Scalars, $B-L$ and $L_i-L_j$ Vectors