arXiv subjects

Jonas Frerick

Publications and source records attributed to Jonas Frerick.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Precision Solar System Dynamics for Ultralight Dark Matter Search

Ultralight dark matter exhibits an order-one density fluctuation at the scale of its wavelength. This density fluctuation exists across the entire dark matter halo and interacts with stars and planets, perturbing their motion via gravitational interactions. We investigate the possibility of using precision solar system dynamics to search for ultralight dark matter. We examine this possibility with interplanetary radio range measurements. We show that the precision of current range measurements can probe ultralight dark matter at masses around $10^{-15}\,$eV, had its density in the solar system been $10^5$ larger than the so-called local dark matter density. This limit complements other constraints, such as the one from analyses of pulsar timing observations.

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arXiv2026

Improved Big Bang Nucleosynthesis constraints on decaying massive relics

We present updated and improved Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) constraints on heavy, long-lived beyond the Standard Model (BSM) relics $\phi$ decaying into pairs of Standard Model particles, covering a comprehensive set of two-body decay channels. We treat the leading effects of these injections in detail, discussing the modification of the neutron-to-proton ratio from hadronic interconversions, as well as hadro- and photodisintegration of the light elements. Our analysis incorporates several important refinements with respect to earlier work. We adopt up-to-date primordial abundance measurements, including the new $^4$He determination and the latest nuclear reaction rates. The hadronic and electromagnetic injection spectra are computed using PYTHIA 8, providing a proper treatment of final-state radiation and hadronisation. We further implement an improved treatment of $p\leftrightarrow n$ interconversions, accounting for dynamical equilibrium, kaon-induced processes, and updated rates. Additionally, we make use of a refined hadrodisintegration formalism which allows us to also consider disintegration processes while BBN is still active. Together, these improvements yield updated exclusion contours on lifetime, mass, and abundance of the relic for each decay channel considered. Furthermore, we discuss the irreducible freeze-in contribution from inverse decays.

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arXiv2025

Photo- and Hadrodisintegration constraints on massive relics decaying into neutrinos

We perform a detailed study of the cosmological constraints on the decay of a relic particle $\phi$ into neutrinos, $\phi \rightarrow \nu \bar{\nu}$, in particular those arising from the observed light-element abundances in the early Universe. We focus on the late-time disintegration of the light elements previously synthesised during BBN. Several processes are relevant, including final-state radiation associated with the decay, as well as subsequent interactions of the injected neutrinos with the thermal background neutrinos or between themselves. All processes generically contribute to the production of electromagnetic and often also hadronic material and may therefore induce late-time photodisintegration and hadrodisintegration reactions, i.e.~the destruction of light elements that have previously been formed during BBN. Here, we examine this scenario with a Monte-Carlo inspired probabilistic approach rather than Boltzmann techniques, taking into account all of these different reactions as well as their interplay. We find the resulting constraints to be very significant, covering a broad range of previously unexplored masses and lifetimes of the relic source particle.

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arXiv2023

Riding the dark matter wave: Novel limits on general dark photons from LISA Pathfinder

We note the possibility to perform a parametrically improved search for gauged baryon ($B$) and baryon minus lepton ($B-L$) Dark Photon Dark Matter (DPDM) using auxiliary channel data from LISA Pathfinder. In particular we use the measurement of the differential movement between the test masses (TMs) and the space craft (SC) which is nearly as sensitive as the tracking between the two TMs. TMs and SC are made from different materials and therefore have different charge-to-mass ratios for both $B-L$ and $B$. Thus, the surrounding DPDM field induces a relative acceleration of nearly constant frequency. For the case of $B-L$, we find that LISA Pathfinder can constrain previously unexplored parameter space, providing the world leading limits in the mass range $4\cdot 10^{-19}\,\text{eV}<m<3\cdot 10^{-17}\,\text{eV}$. This limit can easily be recast also for dark photons that arise from gauging other global symmetries of the SM.

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arXiv2022

$A'$ view of the sunrise: Boosting helioscopes with angular information

The Sun may copiously produce hypothetical light particles such as axions or dark photons, a scenario which can be experimentally probed with so-called helioscopes. Here we investigate the impact of the angular and spectral distribution of solar dark photons on the sensitivity of such instruments. For the first time we evaluate this spectral and angular dependence of the dark photon flux over the whole mass range and apply this information to existing data from the Hinode Solar X-Ray Telescope. Specifically we use calibration images for a classical helioscope analysis as well as data from a solar eclipse providing sensitivity to exceptionally large oscillation lengths. We demonstrate that exploiting the signal features can boost the constraints by more than one order of magnitude in terms of the mixing parameter compared to a naive counting experiment.

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arXiv2021

The ups and downs of inelastic dark matter: Electron recoils from terrestrial upscattering

The growing interest in the interactions between dark matter particles and electrons has received a further boost by the observation of an excess in electron recoil events in the XENON1T experiment. Of particular interest are dark matter models in which the scattering process is inelastic, such that the ground state can upscatter into an excited state. The subsequent exothermic downscattering of such excited states on electrons can lead to observable signals in direct detection experiments and gives a good fit to the XENON1T excess. In this work, we study terrestrial upscattering, i.e. inelastic scattering of dark matter particles on nuclei in the Earth, as a plausible origin of such excited states. Using both analytical and Monte Carlo methods, we obtain detailed predictions of their density and velocity distribution. These results enable us to explore the time dependence of the flux of excited states resulting from the rotation of the Earth. For the case of XENON1T, we find the resulting daily modulation of the electron recoil signal to be at the level of 10% with a strong dependence on the dark matter mass.

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