Dark matter monopoles, vectors and photons

TL;DR

This paper explores a dark sector with magnetic monopoles, dark photons, and vector bosons, analyzing their cosmological production, relic density, and potential to address small-scale structure problems in cosmology.

Contribution

It introduces a model with monopoles, dark photons, and vectors, and studies their cosmological implications and constraints, including relic density and self-interactions.

Findings

Monopoles with masses of a few hundred TeV can significantly contribute to dark matter.

Dark photon radiation affects the relativistic particle density Neff.

Regions of parameter space can alleviate small-scale structure issues.

Abstract

In a secluded dark sector which is coupled to the Standard Model via a Higgs portal interaction we arrange for the existence of 't Hooft-Polyakov magnetic monopoles and study their implications for cosmology. We point out that a dark sector which can accommodate stable monopoles will also contain massless dark photons gamma' as well as charged massive vector bosons W'. The dark matter in this scenario will be a combination of magnetically and electrically charged species under the unbroken U(1) subgroup of the dark sector. We estimate the cosmological production rate of monopoles and the rate of monopole-anti-monopole annihilation and conclude that monopoles with masses of few hundred TeV or greater, can produce sizeable contributions to the observed dark matter relic density. We scan over the parameter space and compute the relic density for monopoles and vector bosons. Turning to the dark photon radiation, we compute their contribution to the measured density of relativistic particles Neff and also apply observational constraints from the Bullet cluster and other large scale galaxies on long-range interactions for the self-interacting dark matter components made out of monopoles and out of dark vector bosons. At scales relevant for dwarf galaxies we identify regions on the parameter space where self-interacting monopole and vector dark mater components can aid solving the core-cusp and the too-big-to-fail problems.