Dark Photons from Perturbative Decay of a Misaligned Higgs Field
James M. Cline, Gonzalo Herrera, Jean-Samuel Roux
hep-ph, astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.HE
Submitted: 2026-07-31
Comments: 14 pages, 3 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We reconsider the production of dark photons A' as dark matter, from the perturbative decay of a dark Higgs field h, that is stochastically misaligned from the minimum of its potential during
Terminology
Abstract
We reconsider the production of dark photons A' as dark matter, from the perturbative decay of a dark Higgs field h, that is stochastically misaligned from the minimum of its potential during inflation. This is a simple and predictive framework for generating the A' relic abundance. It is constrained by structure formation, since the A' are initially boosted, and inflationary isocurvature fluctuations, which require small quartic couplings lambda h 4. We identify A' masses between 100 eV and 1 GeV and gauge couplings g about 10-15-10-10 that are consistent in this scenario, and which become more tightly constrained if a generic level of kinetic mixing is present. The favored parameter region could be tested through future CMB or Lyman- alpha observations, and, in the presence of kinetic mixing, by direct detection experiments or diffuse soft gamma-ray searches.
Sources
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- The Stochastic Axion Scenario
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