2012/01/31 by Paola Arias, Davide Cadamuro, Mark Goodsell +3 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2012/06/013
v2: Labels of figure 2 corrected, new text in section 4 added, 29 pages, 4 figures. Final version accepted for publication in JCAP
arxiv created 2012/06/14 · arxiv updated 2015/06/03
Very weakly interacting slim particles (WISPs), such as axion-like particles (ALPs) or hidden photons (HPs), may be non-thermally produced via the misalignment mechanism in the early universe and survive as a cold dark matter population until today. We find that, both for ALPs and HPs whose dominant interactions with the standard model arise from couplings to photons, a huge region in the parameter spaces spanned by photon coupling and ALP or HP mass can give rise to the observed cold dark matter. Remarkably, a large region of this parameter space coincides with that predicted in well motivated models of fundamental physics. A wide range of experimental searches -- exploiting haloscopes (direct dark matter searches exploiting microwave cavities), helioscopes (searches for solar ALPs or HPs), or light-shining-through-a-wall techniques -- can probe large parts of this parameter space in the foreseeable future.