Fermionic dark matter-photon quantum interaction: A mechanism for darkness

TL;DR

This paper explores a fermionic dark matter model with photon interactions, demonstrating mechanisms that suppress light signals and support the dark nature of the particles, while allowing interactions with nucleons.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fermionic dark matter-photon interaction framework that explains darkness through quantum field theoretical mechanisms and suppression of light signals.

Findings

Non-polarized pair annihilation vanishes at small angles even with radiative corrections

Photon interactions with dark matter are suppressed, supporting darkness

Dark matter can still interact with nucleons in this framework

Abstract

Mass dimension one fermionic fields are prime candidates to describe dark matter, due to their intrinsic neutral nature, as they are constructed as eigenstates of the charge conjugation operator with dual helicity. To formulate the meaning of the darkness, the fermion-photon coupling is scrutinized with a Pauli-like interaction, and the path integral is then formulated from the phase space constraint structure. Ward-Takahashi-like identities and Schwinger-Dyson equations, together with renormalizability, are employed to investigate a phenomenological mechanism to avoid external light signals. Accordingly, the non-polarized pair annihilation and Compton-like processes are shown to vanish at the limit of small scattering angles even if considering 1-loop radiative corrections, reinforcing the dark matter interpretation. However, dark matter interactions with nucleons are still possible. Motivated by recent nucleon-recoil experiments to detect dark matter, we furnish a consistent theoretical setup to describe interaction with the photon compatible with the prevalence of darkness.