Tag Archives: axions

December 7, 2017

Primordial Black Holes and Dark Matter

By Stephen Perrenod

Based on observed gravitational interactions in galactic halos (galaxy rotation curves) and in group and clusters, there appears to be 5 times as much dark matter as ordinary matter in the universe. The alternative is no dark matter, but more gravity than expected at low accelerations, as discussed in this post on emergent gravity.

The main candidates for dark matter are exotic, undiscovered particles such as WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) and axions. Experiments attempting direct detection for these have repeatedly come up short.

The non-particle alternative category is MACHOs (massive compact halo objects) composed of ordinary matter.  Planets, dwarf stars and neutron stars have been ruled out by various observational signatures. The one ordinary matter possibility that has remained viable is that of black holes, and in particular black holes with much less than the mass of the Sun.

The only known possibility for such low mass black holes is that of primordial black holes (PBHs) formed in the earliest moments of the Big Bang.

Gravitational microlensing, or microlensing for short, seeks to detect PBHs by their general relativistic gravitational effect on starlight. MACHO and EROS were experiments to monitor stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. These were able to place limits on the abundance of PBHs with masses from about one hundred millionth of a the Sun’s mass up to 10 solar masses. PBHs from that mass range are not able to explain the total amount of dark matter determined from gravitational interactions.

LIGO has recently detected several merging black holes in the tens of solar mass range. However the frequency of LIGO detections appears too low by two orders of magnitude to explain the amount of gravitationally detected dark matter. PBHs in this mass range are also constrained by cosmic microwave background observations.

Extremely low mass PBHs, below 10 billion tons, cannot survive until the present epoch of the universe. This is due to Hawking radiation. Black holes evaporate due to their quantum nature. Solar mass black holes have an extremely long lifetime against evaporation. But very low mass black holes will evaporate in billions of years or much sooner, depending on mass.

The remaining mass window for possible PBH, in sufficient amount to explain dark matter, is from about 10 trillion ton objects up to those with ten millionths of the Sun’s mass.

MicrolensingPBHAndromeda

Figure 5 from H. Niikura et al. “Microlensing constraints on primordial black holes with the Subaru/HSC Andromeda observation”, https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02151  

Here f is the fraction of dark matter which can be explained by PBHs. The red shaded area is excluded by the authors observations and analysis of Andromeda Galaxy data. This rules out masses above 100 trillion tons and below a hundred thousandth of the Sun’s mass. (Solar mass units used above and grams are used below).

 

Now, a team of Japanese astronomers have used the Subaru telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii (operated by Japan’s national observatory) to determine constraints on PBHs by observing millions of stars in the Andromeda Galaxy.

The idea is that a candidate PBH would pass in front of the line of sight to the star, acting as a lens, and magnifying the light from the star in question for a relatively brief period of time. The astronomers looked for stars exhibiting variability in their light intensity.

With only a single nights’ data they made repeated short exposures and were able to pick out over 15,000 stars in Andromeda exhibiting such variable light intensity. However, among these possible candidates, only a single one turned out to fit the characteristics expected for a PBH detection.

If PBHs in this mass range were sufficiently abundant to explain dark matter, then one would have expected of order one thousand events, and they saw nothing like this number. In summary, with 95% confidence, they are able to rule out PBHs as the main source of dark matter for the mass range from 100 trillion tons up to one hundred thousandth of the Sun’s mass.

The window for primordial black holes as the explanation for dark matter appears to be closing.

 

 

 

 

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October 31, 2016

Axions, Inflation and Baryogenesis: It’s a SMASH (pi)

By darkmatterdarkenergy

Searches for direct detection of dark matter have focused primarily on WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) and more precisely on LSPs (the lightest supersymmetric particle). These are hypothetical particles such as neutralinos that are least massive members of the hypothesized family of supersymmetric partner particles.

But supersymmetry may be dead. There have been no supersymmetric particles detected at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN as of yet, leading many to say that this is a crisis in physics.

At the same time as CERN has not been finding evidence for supersymmetry, WIMP dark matter searches have been coming up empty as well. These searches keep increasing in sensitivity with larger and better detectors and the parameter space for supersymmetric WIMPs is becoming increasingly constrained. Enthusiasm unabated, the WIMP dark matter searchers continue to refine their experiments.

1-worldsmostse

LUX dark matter detector in a mine in Lead, South Dakota is not yet detecting WIMPs. Credit: Matt Kapust/ Sanford Underground Research Facility

What if there is no supersymmetry? Supersymmetry adds a huge number of particles to the particle zoo. Is there a simpler explanation for dark matter?

Alternative candidates under consideration for dark matter, including sterile neutrinos, axions, and primordial black holes, and are now getting more attention.

From a prior blog I wrote about axions as dark matter candidates:

Axions do not require the existence of supersymmetry. They have a strong theoretical basis in the Standard Model as an outgrowth of the necessity to have charge conjugation plus parity conserved in the strong nuclear force (quantum chromodynamics of quarks, gluons). This conservation property is known as CP-invariance. (While CP-invariance holds for the strong force, the weak force is CP violating).

In addition to the dark matter problem, there are two more outstanding problems at the intersection of cosmology and particle physics. These are baryogenesis, the mechanism by which matter won out over antimatter (as a result of CP violation of Charge and Parity), and inflation. A period of inflation very early on in the universe’s history is necessary to explain the high degree of homogeneity (uniformity) we see on large scales and the near flatness of the universe’s topology. The cosmic microwave background is at a uniform temperature of 2.73 Kelvins to better than one part in a hundred thousand across the sky, and yet, without inflation, those different regions could never have been in causal contact.

A team of European physicists have proposed a model SMASH that does not require supersymmetry and instead adds a few particles to the Standard Model zoo, one of which is the axion and is already highly motivated from observed CP violation. SMASH (Standard Model Axion Seesaw Higgs portal inflation) also adds three right-handed heavy neutrinos (the three known light neutrinos are all left-handed). And it adds a complex singlet scalar field which is the primary driver of inflation although the Higgs field can play a role as well.

The SMASH model is of interest for new physics at around 10^11 GeV or 100 billion times the rest mass of the proton. For comparison, the Planck scale is near 10^19 GeV and the LHC is exploring up to around 10^4 GeV (the proton rest mass is just under 1 GeV and in this context GeV is short hand for GeV divided by the speed of light squared).

smashcmb

Figure 1 from Ballesteros G. et al. 2016. The colored contours represent observational limits from the Planck satellite and other sources regarding the tensor-to-scalar power ratio of primordial density fluctuations (r, y-axis) and the spectral index of these fluctuations (ns, x-axis). These constraints on primordial density fluctuations in turn constrain the inflation models. The dashed lines ξ = 1, .1, .01, .001 represent a key parameter in the assumed slow-roll inflation potential function. The near vertical lines labelled 50, 60, 70, 80 indicate the number N of e-folds to the end of inflation, i.e. the universe inflates by a factor of e^N in each of 3 spatial dimensions during the inflation phase.

So with a single model, with a few extensions to the Standard Model, including heavy right-handed (sterile) neutrinos, an inflation field, and an axion, the dark matter, baryogenesis and inflation issues are all addressed. There is no need for supersymmetry in the SMASH model and the axion and heavy neutrinos are already well motivated from particle physics considerations and should be detectable at low energies. Baryogenesis in the SMASH model is a result of decay of the massive right-handed neutrinos.

Now the mass of the axion is extremely low, of order 50 to 200 μeV (millionths of an eV) in their model (by comparison, neutrino mass limits are of order 1 eV), and detection is a difficult undertaking.

There is currently only one active terrestrial axion experiment for direct detection, ADMX. It has its primary detection region at lower masses than the SMASH model is suggesting, and has placed interesting limits in the 1 to 10 μeV range. It is expected to push its range up to around 30 μeV in a couple of years. But other experiments such as MADMAX and ORPHEUS are coming on line in the next few years that will explore the region around 100 μeV, which is more interesting for the SMASH model.

Not sure why the researchers didn’t call this the SMASHpie model (Standard Model Axion Seesaw Higgs portal inflation), because it’s a pie in the face to Supersymmetry!

stooges_heavenlydaze

It would be wonderfully economical to explain baryogenesis, inflation, and dark matter with a handful of new particles, and to finally detect dark matter particles directly.

Reference

“Unifying inflation with the axion, dark matter, baryogenesis and the seesaw mechanism” Ballesteros G., Redondo J., Ringwald A., and Tamarit C. 2016  https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05414

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September 23, 2015

Dark Axion Stars

By darkmatterdarkenergy

In a post from 4 years ago I discussed “Dark Matter Powered Stars”.

The context here was neutralino dark matter, which is a possible explanation for very massive stars in the early universe. The idea is that the very first stars could be thousands of solar masses, much greater than is possible with ordinary matter dominated stars. They would be powered by dark matter annihilation in their cores during the early part of their life. They would eventually collapse to black holes and could be candidates to seed supermassive black holes found at the center of many galaxies.

Sirius_A_and_B_Hubble_photo

Hubble Space Telescope image of Sirius A and Sirius B (lower left) 

NASA, ESA, H. Bond (STScI), and M. Barstow (University of Leicester)

Another dark matter candidate apart from the neutralino is the axion. While the neutralino is expected to have masses in the several to tens of GeV (Giga-electron-Volts), the axion mass is a tiny fraction of an eV, at least a trillion times smaller than the expected neutralino mass. So there would be many more of them, of course, to explain the amount of dark matter we detect gravitationally.

Neither neutralinos nor axions have been discovered to date. The axion does not require supersymmetry beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, so in that sense it is a more conservative proposed candidate.

Currently we detect dark matter only through its gravitational effects – in galaxies, in clusters of galaxies, and at the very large scale by looking at thermal variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

In addition there are three main direct methods to try to ‘see’ these elusive particles. One is to directly detect dark matter (e.g. neutralinos) here on Earth when it collides with ordinary matter – or in the case of axions – generates photons in the presence of a magnetic field. Another is to attempt to create it at the Large Hadron Collider, and the third is to look in space for astrophysical signals resulting from dark matter. These could include gamma rays produced in the galactic center when dark matter mutually annihilates.

In a paper recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters and titled “Accretion of dark matter by stars”, Richard Brito, Vitor Cardoso and Hirotada Okawa discuss a different kind of dark star, one whose dark matter component is axions. The paper is available here.

There are two formation scenarios envisaged. The first is that dark matter (axion) stellar cores form and then these accrete additional dark matter and ordinary matter. In the second scenario, a star forms primarily from ordinary matter, but then accretes a significant amount of dark matter.

We are talking about dark matter fractions which may be say 5% or 20% of the total mass of the star.

The authors find that stable configurations seem to be possible and that the axion dark matter may lead to stellar oscillations in the microwave band. So looking for stellar oscillations in the Gigahertz range may be another astrophysical detection method for dark matter. They intend to explore the idea more deeply in future research.

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