Natural ultralight dark matter: The quadratic twin

Scalar ultralight dark matter (ULDM) is uniquely accessible to tabletop experiments such as clocks and interferometers, and its search has been the focus of a vast experimental effort. However, the scalar ULDM mass is not protected from radiative corrections, and the entirety of the parameter space within reach of experiments suffers from a severe naturalness problem. In this paper, we propose a new twin mechanism that protects the mass of the scalar ULDM. Our scalar ULDM is a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson with quadratic couplings to the standard model (SM) and to a twin copy of the SM, with a mirror <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <a:msub> <a:mi mathvariant="double-struck">Z</a:mi> <a:mn>2</a:mn> </a:msub> </a:math> symmetry exchanging each SM particle with its twin. Due to the mirror symmetry, the leading-order mass correction is quadratic in the (tiny) coupling while the linear order is canceled. This opens up vast regions of parameter space for natural quadratically coupled ultralight dark matter, within the sensitivity of existing and future experiments.