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arXiv · 2403.15536

Runaway Gravitational Production of Dark Photons

Christian Capanelli·Leah Jenks·Edward W. Kolb·Evan McDonough
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Abstract

We demonstrate that gravitational particle production (GPP) of a massive, Abelian, vector (Proca) field during inflation in the presence of nonminimal coupling to gravity may suffer from an instability which leads to runaway production of high-momentum modes. This is untenable unless there is some mechanism to regulate the runaway. We discuss the parameter space of the particle mass and nonminimal couplings where such a runaway occurs and possible ways to tame the runaway. We find that there is no obvious way to resolve the runaway in a UV completion or with kinetic mixing to the standard model.

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Christian Capanelli, Leah Jenks, Edward W. Kolb, Evan McDonough. 2024-03-22. Runaway Gravitational Production of Dark Photons. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.133.061602

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