arXiv:1810.07188 [hep-ph]AbstractReferencesReviewsResources
Relic Abundance of Dark Photon Dark Matter
Prateek Agrawal, Naoya Kitajima, Matthew Reece, Toyokazu Sekiguchi, Fuminobu Takahashi
Published 2018-10-16Version 1
We present a new mechanism for producing the correct relic abundance of dark photon dark matter over a wide range of its mass, extending down to $10^{-20}\,\mathrm{eV}$. The dark matter abundance is initially stored in an axion which is misaligned from its minimum. When the axion starts oscillating, it efficiently transfers its energy into dark photons via a tachyonic instability. If the dark photon mass is within a few orders of magnitude of the axion mass, $m_{\gamma'}/m_a = {\cal O}(10^{-3} - 1)$, then dark photons make up the dominant form of dark matter today. We present a numerical lattice simulation for a benchmark model that explicitly realizes our mechanism. This mechanism firms up the motivation for a number of experiments searching for dark photon dark matter.