Probing dark photons with plasma haloscopes
Abstract
Dark photons (DPs) produced in the early Universe are well-motivated dark matter (DM) candidates. We show that the recently proposed tunable plasma haloscopes are particularly advantageous for DP searches. While in-medium effects suppress the DP signal in conventional searches, plasma haloscopes make use of metamaterials that enable resonant absorption of the DP by matching its mass to a tunable plasma frequency and thus enable efficient plasmon production. Using thermal field theory, we confirm the in-medium DP absorption rate within the detector. This scheme allows us to competitively explore a significant part of the DP DM parameter space in the DP mass range of 6 - 400 μ eV . If a signal is observed, the observation of a daily or annual modulation of the signal would be crucial to clearly identify the signal as due to DP DM and could shed light on the production mechanism.
- Publication:
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Physical Review D
- Pub Date:
- August 2020
- DOI:
- 10.1103/PhysRevD.102.043003
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2006.06836
- Bibcode:
- 2020PhRvD.102d3003G
- Keywords:
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- High Energy Physics - Phenomenology;
- Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics;
- High Energy Physics - Experiment
- E-Print:
- 13 pages, 4 figures. Added several references, a new figure and minor changes to match published version