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Dark Photon Oscillations in Our Inhomogeneous Universe

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arxiv 2002.05165 v3 pith:EYARB7EC submitted 2020-02-12 astro-ph.CO hep-ph

Dark Photon Oscillations in Our Inhomogeneous Universe

classification astro-ph.CO hep-ph
keywords photondarkoscillationsmassphotonsplasmaconstraintsformalism
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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A dark photon may kinetically mix with the ordinary photon, inducing oscillations with observable imprints on cosmology. Oscillations are resonantly enhanced if the dark photon mass equals the ordinary photon plasma mass, which tracks the free electron number density. Previous studies have assumed a homogeneous Universe; in this Letter, we introduce for the first time an analytic formalism for treating resonant oscillations in the presence of inhomogeneities of the photon plasma mass. We apply our formalism to determine constraints from Cosmic Microwave Background photons oscillating into dark photons, and from heating of the primordial plasma due to dark photon dark matter converting into low-energy photons. Including the effect of inhomogeneities demonstrates that prior homogeneous constraints are not conservative, and simultaneously extends current experimental limits into a vast new parameter space.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Ultralight dark matter detection with trapped-ion interferometry

    hep-ph 2025-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    A trapped ion in a spin-motion entangled state can detect kinetically mixed dark photon dark matter in the 10^{-15} to 10^{-14} eV mass range through Aharonov-Bohm phase shifts with parametrically enhanced sensitivity.

  2. Searching for dark photon dark matter from terrestrial magnetic fields

    hep-ph 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    New upper limits on the dark photon kinetic mixing parameter ε are derived from geomagnetic data for masses between 1e-15 and 2e-13 eV, improving prior ground-based constraints.

  3. Boomerang mechanism explaining the excess radio background

    hep-ph 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0

    A two-stage mechanism where relic neutrinos convert to dark neutrinos in the early universe and later decay into photon states can explain the ARCADE 2 excess radio background while evading neutrino magnetic moment bounds.

  4. The Dark Photon

    hep-ph 2020-05 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    The paper surveys theoretical motivations, experimental searches, and bounds on the dark photon as a kinetically mixed gauge boson from a dark sector, covering both massive and massless cases along with related milli-...