Runaway Gravitational Production of Dark Photons
We demonstrate that gravitational particle production of a massive, Abelian, vector (Proca) field during inflation in the presence of nonminimal coupling to gravity may suffer from an instability which leads to runaway production of high-momentum modes. This is untenable unless there is some mechanism to regulate the runaway. We discuss the parameter space of the particle mass and nonminimal couplings where such a runaway occurs and possible ways to tame the runaway. We find that there is no obvious way to resolve the runaway in a UV completion or with kinetic mixing to the standard model.
Authors
- Evan McDonough (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2130-3903)
- Leah Jenks (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9212-2034)
- Christian Capanelli (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3508-3099)
- Edward W. Kolb (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7148-4052)
Institutions
- Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (US)
- University of Chicago (US)
- McGill University (CA)
- The University of Winnipeg (CA)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Physical Review Letters
- Published
- 2024-08-09
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.133.061602
- Citations
- 16
- Primary Topic
- Cosmology and Gravitation Theories
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 5.30
Funders
- U.S. Department of Energy
- University of Chicago
- McGill University
- Research Manitoba
- Strong
- Canada First Research Excellence Fund
- Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada