Effects of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking on Axion Like Particles as Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electroweak symmetry breaking influences axion-like particles as dark matter, revealing modifications in their mass and oscillation behavior that expand the viable parameter space for detection.

Contribution

It introduces a higher order Higgs portal interaction affecting ALP evolution, broadening the parameter space for future experimental probing.

Findings

EWSB contributes to ALP mass during symmetry breaking.

Oscillation frequencies of ALPs are modified during EWSB.

Relic parameter space for ALPs is expanded, enabling new experimental tests.

Abstract

Axion like particles (ALPs), the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons associated to the spontaneous breaking of global symmetry, have emerged as promising dark matter candidates. Conventionally, in the context of misalignment mechanism, the non-thermally produced ALPs happen to stay frozen due to Hubble friction initially and at a later stage, they begin to oscillate (before matter-radiation equality) at characteristic frequencies defined by their masses and behaving like cold dark matter. In this work, we study the influence of electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB), through a higher order Higgs portal interaction, on the evolution of ALPs. Such an interaction is found to contribute partially to the ALP's mass during EWSB, thereby modifying oscillation frequencies during EWSB as well as impacting upon the existing correlation between the scale of symmetry breaking and their masses. The novelty of the work lies in broadening the relic satisfied parameter space so as to probe it in near future via a wide range of experiments.