Abstract
Dark photons are a theorized massive spin-1 particle which can be produced via various mechanisms, including cosmological gravitational particle production (GPP) in the early universe. In this work, we extend previous results for GPP of dark photons to include nonminimal couplings to gravity. We find that nonminimal couplings can induce a ghost instability or lead to runaway particle production at high momentum and discuss the constraints on the parameter space such that the theory is free of instabilities. Within the instability-free regime we numerically calculate the particle production and find that the inclusion of nonminimal couplings can lead to an enhancement of the particle number. As a result, GPP of nonminimally coupled dark photons can open the parameter space for production of a cosmological relevant relic density (constituting all or part of the dark matter) as compared to the minimally-coupled theory. These results are independent of the choice of inflation model, which we demonstrate by repeating the analysis for a class of rapid-turn multi-field inflation models.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Anamaria Hell, Bohdan Grzadkowski, Andrew Long, and Anna Socha for helpful discussions and correspondence. C.C. is supported by a fellowship from the Trottier Space Institute at McGill via an endowment from the Trottier Family Foundation, and by the Arthur B. McDonald Institute via the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF). L.J. is supported by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. The work of E.W.K. was supported in part by the US Department of Energy contract DE-FG02-13ER41958 and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. E.M. is supported in part by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and by a New Investigator Operating Grant from Research Manitoba.
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Capanelli, C., Jenks, L., Kolb, E.W. et al. Gravitational production of completely dark photons with nonminimal couplings to gravity. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 71 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2024)071
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2024)071