Ultralight Dilatonic Dark Matter

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Banerjee, Abhishek, Csáki, Csaba, Geller, Michael, Heller-Algazi, Zamir, Ismail, Ameen
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Banerjee, Abhishek
Csáki, Csaba
Geller, Michael
Heller-Algazi, Zamir
Ismail, Ameen
author_facet Banerjee, Abhishek
Csáki, Csaba
Geller, Michael
Heller-Algazi, Zamir
Ismail, Ameen
contents The dilaton, a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson (pNGB) of broken scale invariance, is an appealing ultralight dark matter (DM) candidate. Its mass is protected by conformal invariance and it can be searched for in tabletop experiments. However, contrary to standard pNGBs of internal symmetries, the dilaton generically has a large non-derivative self-coupling, leading to radiative contributions to its mass of the order of its decay constant. Hence typical ultralight dilatons should also have sub-eV decay constants, which would incur significant deviations from standard DM behavior at structure formation times, in severe tension with observations. Therefore, a fine-tuning is required to generate a hierarchy between the mass and the decay constant. In this work, we consider whether supersymmetry (SUSY) can be used to protect this hierarchy from quantum corrections. To ensure an ultralight dilaton mass robust against realistic SUSY-breaking contributions, we must consider a novel dilaton stabilization mechanism. The observed DM abundance can be produced by the misalignment mechanism for dilaton masses ranging from $10^{-11}$ to $1$ eV. Unfortunately, irreducible SUSY-breaking corrections due to gravity restrict the couplings between the dilaton and the Standard Model to be extremely small, beyond the reach of any current or proposed experiments. Our work demonstrates that constructing a consistent model of ultralight dilaton DM is quite involved.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_21659
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ultralight Dilatonic Dark Matter
Banerjee, Abhishek
Csáki, Csaba
Geller, Michael
Heller-Algazi, Zamir
Ismail, Ameen
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
The dilaton, a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson (pNGB) of broken scale invariance, is an appealing ultralight dark matter (DM) candidate. Its mass is protected by conformal invariance and it can be searched for in tabletop experiments. However, contrary to standard pNGBs of internal symmetries, the dilaton generically has a large non-derivative self-coupling, leading to radiative contributions to its mass of the order of its decay constant. Hence typical ultralight dilatons should also have sub-eV decay constants, which would incur significant deviations from standard DM behavior at structure formation times, in severe tension with observations. Therefore, a fine-tuning is required to generate a hierarchy between the mass and the decay constant. In this work, we consider whether supersymmetry (SUSY) can be used to protect this hierarchy from quantum corrections. To ensure an ultralight dilaton mass robust against realistic SUSY-breaking contributions, we must consider a novel dilaton stabilization mechanism. The observed DM abundance can be produced by the misalignment mechanism for dilaton masses ranging from $10^{-11}$ to $1$ eV. Unfortunately, irreducible SUSY-breaking corrections due to gravity restrict the couplings between the dilaton and the Standard Model to be extremely small, beyond the reach of any current or proposed experiments. Our work demonstrates that constructing a consistent model of ultralight dilaton DM is quite involved.
title Ultralight Dilatonic Dark Matter
topic High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21659