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Dark Photon Stars: Formation and Role as Dark Matter Substructure
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abstract
Any new vector boson with non-zero mass (a `dark photon' or `Proca boson') that is present during inflation is automatically produced at this time from vacuum fluctuations and can comprise all or a substantial fraction of the observed dark matter density, as shown by Graham, Mardon, and Rajendran. We demonstrate, utilising both analytic and numerical studies, that such a scenario implies an extremely rich dark matter substructure arising purely from the interplay of gravitational interactions and quantum effects. Due to a remarkable parametric coincidence between the size of the primordial density perturbations and the scale at which quantum pressure is relevant, a substantial fraction of the dark matter inevitably collapses into gravitationally bound solitons, which are fully quantum coherent objects. The central densities of these `dark photon star', or `Proca star', solitons are typically a factor $10^6$ larger than the local background dark matter density, and they have characteristic masses of $10^{-16} M_\odot (10^{-5}{\rm eV}/m)^{3/2}$, where $m$ is the mass of the vector. During and post soliton production a comparable fraction of the energy density is initially stored in, and subsequently radiated from, long-lived quasi-normal modes. Furthermore, the solitons are surrounded by characteristic `fuzzy' dark matter halos in which quantum wave-like properties are also enhanced relative to the usual virialized dark matter expectations. Lower density compact halos, with masses a factor of $\sim 10^5$ greater than the solitons, form at much larger scales. We argue that, at minimum, the solitons are likely to survive to the present day without being tidally disrupted. This rich substructure, which we anticipate also arises from other dark photon dark matter production mechanisms, opens up a wide range of new direct and indirect detection possibilities, as we discuss in a companion paper.
Forward citations
Cited by 8 Pith papers
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Core-Halo Mass Relation in Cosmological Vector Dark Matter
Confirmed Proca-star cores in vector dark matter follow M_star ≈ 2.65 M_halo^0.64, with only about 10% of halos hosting a detectable core.
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Spin Polarization of Proca Stars Formed by Gravitational Bose--Einstein Condensation
Gravitationally condensed Proca stars exhibit partial spin polarization controlled by the elliptical polarization of the dominant component-space mode, with ensemble mean χ_net ≈ 0.62 and large realization-to-realizat...
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Constraining Dark Photon Dark Matter with Radio Silence from Soliton Mergers around Supermassive Black Holes
Non-observation of radio bursts from soliton mergers around supermassive black holes constrains dark photon solitons to make up less than about 1% of dark matter, with future surveys reaching 0.2%.
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Out of the darkness: probing the inflationary era with dark photon dark matter
A confirmed dark photon dark matter detection at 19.5 micro-electronvolts would, via the inflationary production formula, predict tensor modes just below current limits and within reach of next-generation experiments,...
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Nonrelativistic Proca stars: Spherical stationary and multi-frequency states
Nonrelativistic Proca stars have a ground state with constant polarization (linear or circular depending on the sign of the spin-spin coupling), and a symmetry-enhanced sector with λs=0 contains a continuum of multi-f...
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Gravitational Dark Matter Production in Supergravity $\alpha$-Attractor Inflation
Supergravity corrections in α-attractor inflation suppress gravitational dark matter production and shift the required reheating temperature to 10^3-10^7 GeV.
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The continuum spectrum of nonrelativistic multi-frequency Proca stars
At fixed particle number, spherical multi-frequency Proca stars form continuous 1- and 2-parameter families interpolating between discrete stationary states, and a subset with a nodeless component is linearly stable.
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Large-Scale Structure Probes of the Post-Inflationary Axiverse
HST ultraviolet luminosity function data at z=4-10, combined with Lyman-α and CMB data, place leading constraints on subdominant post-inflationary axion dark matter via its white-noise isocurvature perturbations.
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