Cosmological Implications of Kalb-Ramond-Like-Particles

TL;DR

This paper explores the cosmological production and dark matter potential of Kalb-Ramond-like particles, a type of antisymmetric tensor field from string theory, analyzing various early-universe mechanisms and their observational implications.

Contribution

It introduces the study of primordial production of interacting massive Kalb-Ramond-like particles in cosmology, highlighting their duality properties and potential as dark matter candidates.

Findings

KRLPs can account for the relic dark matter density across a wide mass range.

Multiple production mechanisms, including freeze-in and gravitational production, are viable for KRLPs.

KRLPs may form both warm and cold dark matter subcomponents.

Abstract

The Kalb-Ramond field is an antisymmetric, rank-two tensor field which most notably appears in the context of string theory, but has largely been unexplored in the context of cosmology. In this work, motivated by the Kalb-Ramond field in string theory, and antisymmetric tensor fields that emerge in effective field theories ranging from particle physics to condensed matter, we study the primordial production of interacting massive Kalb-Ramond-like-particles (KRLPs). KRLPs contain features of both dark photon and axion models, which can be appreciated via their duality properties. While the massless non-interacting KRLP is dual to a pseudoscalar, and the massive non-interacting KRLP is dual to a pseudovector, the interacting massive KRLP can be distinguished from its scalar and vector counterparts. We study early-universe production of KRLPs via the freeze-in mechanism, considering a `dark photon-like' interaction, an `axion-like' interaction, and a `Higgs portal' interaction, as well as production via cosmological gravitational particle production. We find that as a dark matter candidate, KRLPs can be produced by all of the above mechanisms and account for the relic density of dark matter today for a wide range of masses. Finally, we comment on the potential to obtain both warm and cold dark matter subcomponents, and speculate on observational and experimental prospects.