2024/11/18 by Pierluca Carenza, Roman Pasechnik, Carenza, Pierluca +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.11716
openalex publication_date 2024/11/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Dark Yang-Mills sectors that confine to form stable composite states, known as glueballs, have been traditionally proposed as a potential explanation for cosmological Dark Matter (DM). Earlier studies have established viability of the lightest scalar glueball as a possible DM candidate. In this work, we explore a whole class of effective composite sectors in the confined Yang-Mills regime featuring an additional pseudoscalar glueball state. We also investigate the role of effective interactions of the dark glueball sector with the visible sectors via higher-dimensional operators primarily focusing on dimension-8 couplings of glueballs to photons and gluons. We stress the remarkable similarities between the phenomenology of such glueball effective theories and Standard Model extensions featuring Axion-Like Particles (ALPs). Hence, one deals with a new class of composite Glueball ALPs (or GALPs) coupled to photons and/or nucleons in a wide mass range, from sub-eV to the Planck scale, yielding viable DM candidates that can be probed by astrophysical and cosmological observations.