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A bstract Ultralight dark matter is a compelling dark matter candidate. In this work, we examine the impact of quadratically-coupled ultralight dark matter on the predictions of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. The presence of ultralight dark matter can modify the effective values of fundamental constants during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, modifying the predicted abundances of the primordial elements such as Helium-4. We improve upon the existing literature in two ways: firstly, we take into account the thermal mass acquired by the ultralight dark matter due to its quadratic interactions with the Standard Model bath, which affects the cosmological evolution of the dark matter. Secondly, we treat the weak freeze-out using the full kinetic equations instead of using an instantaneous approximation. Both improvements were shown to impact the Helium-4 prediction in the context of universally-coupled dark matter in previous work. We extend these lessons to more general couplings. We show that with these modifications, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis provides strong constraints of ultralight dark matter with quadratic couplings to the Standard Model for a large range of masses as compared to other probes of this model, such as equivalence principle tests, atomic and nuclear clocks, as well as astrophysical and other cosmological probes.
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Stochastic fluctuations of bosonic dark matter
Abstract Numerous theories extending beyond the standard model of particle physics predict the existence of bosons that could constitute dark matter. In the standard halo model of galactic dark matter, the velocity distribution of the bosonic dark matter field defines a characteristic coherence time τ c . Until recently, laboratory experiments searching for bosonic dark matter fields have been in the regime where the measurement time T significantly exceeds τ c , so null results have been interpreted by assuming a bosonic field amplitude Φ 0 fixed by the average local dark matter density. Here we show that experiments operating in the T ≪ τ c regime do not sample the full distribution of bosonic dark matter field amplitudes and therefore it is incorrect to assume a fixed value of Φ 0 when inferring constraints. Instead, in order to interpret laboratory measurements (even in the event of a discovery), it is necessary to account for the stochastic nature of such a virialized ultralight field. The constraints inferred from several previous null experiments searching for ultralight bosonic dark matter were overestimated by factors ranging from 3 to 10 depending on experimental details, model assumptions, and choice of inference framework.
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- PAR ID:
- 10310502
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27632-7
