Resonant Gravitational Production of Chiral Dark Photons

Leah Jenks; Marc Kamionkowski; Edward W. Kolb

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arXiv · 2609.22423

Resonant Gravitational Production of Chiral Dark Photons

Leah Jenks·Marc Kamionkowski·Edward W. Kolb

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Abstract

Vector fields with a chiral, parity-odd coupling to a pseudoscalar field are known to undergo resonant amplification. In this work, we study this phenomenon in the context of cosmological gravitational particle production during early-universe inflation. We consider a massive vector (dark photon) field with a parity-odd coupling to the inflaton. There are two regimes of production, delineated by the relative size of the coupling and the dark photon mass, arising from a tachyonic instability, and a parametric resonance, respectively. As a result of the coupling, the transverse modes, subdominant in both the minimally and nonminimally coupled theories, can dominate the total late-time abundance. The viable parameter space for dark-photon dark matter is thus widened. Furthermore, in the tachyonic case, the production is dominated by a single helicity mode, leading to a population of chiral dark photons that can lead to potential parity-violating observational signatures. We further explore the dependence of the production on the reheating history, and find that information about reheating is encoded in the number density spectrum.

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Leah Jenks, Marc Kamionkowski, Edward W. Kolb. 2026-09-18. Resonant Gravitational Production of Chiral Dark Photons. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22423

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