It's humbling to think that ordinary matter, including all of the elementary particles we've ever detected in laboratory experiments, only makes up about 5% of the energy density of the universe. The rest, of course, comes in the form of a dark sector: some form of energy density that can be reliably inferred through the gravitational fields it creates, but which we haven't been able to make or touch directly ourselves. It's irresistible to imagine that the dark sector might be interesting. In other words, thinking like a physicist, it's natural to wonder whether the dark sector might be complicated, with a rich phenomenology all its own. And in fact there is something interesting going on: over the last 15 years we've established that the dark sector comes in at least two different pieces! There is dark matter, 25% of the universe, which we know is like "matter" because it behaves that way -- in particular, it clumps together under the force of gravity, and its energy density dilutes away as the universe expands. And then there is dark energy, 70% of the universe, which seems to be eerily uniform -- smoothly distributed through space, and persistent (non-diluting) through time. So, there is at least that much structure in the dark sector. But so far, there's no evidence of anything interesting beyond that. Indeed, the individual components of dark matter and dark energy seem relatively vanilla and featureless; more precisely, taking them to be "minimal" provides an extremely good fit to the data. For dark matter, "minimal" means that the particles are cold (slowly moving) and basically non-interacting with each other. For dark energy, "minimal" means that it is perfectly constant throughout space and time -- a pure vacuum energy, rather than something more lively. Still -- all we have are upper limits, not firm conclusions. It's certainly possible that there is a bushel of interesting physics going on in the dark sector, but it's just too subtle for us to have noticed yet. So it's important for we theorists to propose specific, testable models of non-minimal dark sectors, so that observers have targets to shoot for when we try to constrain just how interesting the darkness really is. Along those lines, Lotty Ackerman, Matt Buckley, Marc Kamionkowski and I have just submitted a paper that explores what I think is a particularly provocative possibility: that, just like ordinary matter couples to a long-range force known as "electromagnetism" mediated by particles called "photons," dark matter couples to a new long-range force known (henceforth) as "dark electromagnetism," mediated by particles known (from now on) as "dark photons."
Dark Matter and Dark Radiation Authors: Lotty Ackerman, Matthew R. Buckley, Sean M. Carroll, Marc Kamionkowski We explore the feasibility and astrophysical consequences of a new long-range U(1) gauge field ("dark electromagnetism") that couples only to dark matter, not to the Standard Model. The dark matter consists of an equal number of positive and negative charges under the new force, but annihilations are suppressed if the dark matter mass is sufficiently high and the dark fine-structure constant $hatalpha$ is sufficiently small. The correct relic abundance can be obtained if the dark matter also couples to the conventional weak interactions, and we verify that this is consistent with particle-physics constraints. The primary limit on $hatalpha$ comes from the demand that the dark matter be effectively collisionless in galactic dynamics, which implies $hatalpha$ < 10^-3 for TeV-scale dark matter. These values are easily compatible with constraints from structure formation and primordial nucleosynthesis. We raise the prospect of interesting new plasma effects in dark matter dynamics, which remain to be explored.
Just to translate that a bit, here is the idea. We're imagining there is a completely new kind of photon, which couples to dark matter but not to ordinary matter. So there can be dark electric fields, dark magnetic fields, dark radiation, etc. The dark matter itself consists half of particles with dark charge +1, and half with antiparticles with dark charge -1. Now you might say to yourself, "Why don't the particles and antiparticles all just annihilate into dark photons?" That kind of thinking is probably why ideas like this weren't explored twenty years ago (as far as we know). But if you think about it, there is clearly a range of possibilities for which the dark matter doesn't annihilate very efficiently; for example, if the mass of the individual dark matter particles was sufficiently large, their density would be very low, and they just wouldn't ever bump into each other. Alternatively, if the strength of the new force was extremely weak, it just wouldn't be that effective in bringing particles and antiparticles together. None of that is surprising; the interesting bit is that when you run the numbers, they turn out to be pretty darn reasonable, as far as particle physics is concerned. For DM particles weighing several hundred times the mass of the proton, there should be about one DM particle per coffee-cup-sized volume of space. The strength of the dark electromagnetic force is characterized, naturally, by the dark fine-structure constant; remember that ordinary electromagnetism is characterized by the ordinary fine-structure constant α = 1/137. It turns out that the upper limit on the dark fine-structure constant required to stop the dark matter particles from annihilating away is -- about the same! I was expecting it to be 10^-15 or something like that, and it was remarkable that such large values were allowed. However, we know a little more about the dark matter than "it doesn't annhilate." We also know that it is close to collisionless -- dark matter particles don't bump into each other very often. If they did, all sorts of things would happen to the shape of galaxies and clusters that we don't actually observe. So there is another limit on the strength of dark electromagnetism: interactions should be sufficiently weak that dark matter particles don't "cool off" by interacting with each other in galaxies and clusters. That turns into a more stringent bound on the dark fine-structure constant: about an order of magnitude smaller, at $hatalpha$ < 10^-3. Still, not so bad. More interestingly, we can't say with perfect confidence that the dark matter really is effectively non-interacting. If a model like ours is right, and the strength of dark electromagnetism is near the upper bound of its allowed value, there might be very important consequences for the evolution of large-scale structure. At the moment, it's a little bit hard to figure out what those consequences actually are, for mundane calculational reasons. What we are proposing is that the dark matter is really a plasma, and to understand how structure forms, one needs to consider dark magnetohydrodynamics. That's a non-trivial task, but we're hoping it will keep a generation of graduate students cheerfully occupied. The idea of new forces acting on dark matter is by no means new; I've worked on it recently myself, and so have certain co-bloggers. (Strong, silent types who are too proud to blog about their own papers.) What's exciting about dark photons is that they are much more natural from a particle-physics perspective. Typical models of quintessence and long-range fifth forces invoke scalar fields, which are easy and fun to work with, but which by all rights should have huge masses, and therefore not be very long-range at all. The dark photon comes from a gauge symmetry, just like the ordinary photon, and its masslessness is therefore completely natural. Even the dark photon is not new. In a recent paper, Feng, Tu, and Yu proposed not just dark photons, but a barrelful of new dark fields and interactions:
Thermal Relics in Hidden Sectors Authors: Jonathan L. Feng, Huitzu Tu, Hai-Bo Yu Dark matter may be hidden, with no standard model gauge interactions. At the same time, in WIMPless models with hidden matter masses proportional to hidden gauge couplings squared, the hidden dark matter's thermal relic density may naturally be in the right range, preserving the key quantitative virtue of WIMPs. We consider this possibility in detail. We first determine model-independent constraints on hidden sectors from Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background. Contrary to conventional wisdom, large hidden sectors are easily accommodated...
They show that these models manage to evade all sorts of limits you might be worried about, from getting the right relic abundance to fitting in with constraints from primordial nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background. Our model is actually simpler, because we have a different flavor of fish to fry: the possible impacts of this new long-range force in the dark sector on observable cosmological dynamics. We're not sure yet what all of those impacts are, but they are fun to contemplate. And of course, another difference between dark electromagnetism and a boring scalar force is that electromagnetism has both positive and negative charges -- thus, both attractive and repulsive forces. (Scalar forces tend to be simply attractive, and get all mixed up with gravity.) So we can imagine much more than a single species of dark matter; what if you had two different types of stable particles that carried dark charge? Then we'd be able to make dark atoms, and could start writing papers on dark chemistry. You know that dark biology is not far behind. Someday perhaps we'll be exchanging signals with the dark internet.
