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arXiv · 2601.04145

Parity-violating Dark Photon Halos

Stephon Alexander·Lawrence Edmond IV·Cooper Niu
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Abstract

We propose a mechanism for the generation of gravitationally bound dark photon halos during the matter-dominated era. Coupled to an ultralight axion field through a parity-violating Chern-Simons term, dark photons can be produced by the tachyonic instability of axion coherent oscillation. The dark photons with a net helicity lead to a metric vorticity and can generate chiral substructures. For axion masses in the range $10^{-28} \, \mathrm{eV} \lesssim m_a \lesssim 10^{-22} \, \mathrm{eV}$, the resulting inhomogeneities collapse to form halos with masses spanning $M_{\rm halo} \sim 10^5 \, M_{\odot}$ to $10^{11} \, M_{\odot}$, with halo sizes ranging from $O(1)$ to $O(10^{6}) \, \mathrm{pc}$. During halo collapse, the induced vorticity could mediate efficient angular-momentum transport, which enables monolithic collapse and provides primordial seeds for the early formation of supermassive black holes.

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Stephon Alexander, Lawrence Edmond IV, Cooper Niu. 2026-01-07. Parity-violating Dark Photon Halos. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04145

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