Exploring the Universe with Dark Light Scalars

TL;DR

This paper investigates a cosmological model involving light scalar dark matter particles, specifically axions and glueballs, exploring their interactions, perturbations, and potential role in seeding supermassive black holes.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the cosmology of dark axions and glueballs, including their interactions, perturbations, and implications for black hole formation, which is a novel comprehensive study.

Findings

Dark glueball and axion can form multicomponent dark matter.

Dark glueball subcomponent may collapse to seed supermassive black holes.

Mass ranges of dark particles are consistent with black hole seed formation.

Abstract

We study the cosmology of the dark sector consisting of (ultra) light scalars. Since the scalar mass is radiatively unstable, a special explanation is required to make the mass much smaller than the UV scale. There are two well-known mechanisms for the origin of scalar mass. The scalar can be identified as a pseudo-Goldstone boson, whose shift symmetry is explicitly broken by non-perturbative corrections, like the axion. Alternatively, it can be identified as a composite particle like the glueball, whose mass is limited by the confinement scale of the theory. In both cases, the scalar can be naturally light, but interaction behavior is quite different. The lighter the axion (glueball), the weaker (stronger) it interacts. We consider the dark axion whose shift symmetry is anomalously broken by the hidden non-abelian gauge symmetry. After the confinement of the gauge group, the dark axion and the dark glueball get masses and both form multicomponent dark matter. We carefully consider the effects of energy flow from the dark gluons to the dark axions and derive the full equations of motion for the background and the perturbed variables. The effect of the dark axion-dark gluon coupling on the evolution of the entropy and the isocurvature perturbations is also clarified. Finally, we discuss the gravo-thermal collapse of the glueball subcomponent dark matter after the halos form, in order to explore the potential to contribute to the formation of seeds for the supermassive black holes observed at high redshifts. With the simplified assumptions, the glueball subcomponent dark matter with the mass of $0.01-0.1 {\rm MeV}$, and the axion main dark matter component with the decay constant $f_a={\cal O}(10^{15}-10^{16}){\rm GeV}$, the mass of ${\cal O}(10^{-14}-10^{-18})\,{\rm eV}$, can provide the hint on the origin of the supermassive black holes at high redshifts.