Higgsino Dark Matter and the Cosmological Gravitino Problem

We motivate Higgsino dark matter from a solution to the cosmological moduli/gravitino problem. Cosmological moduli/gravitino should be heavy enough to decay before the onset of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, and this requirement typically forces gauginos to have masses above a TeV in Type IIB compactifications. Higgsinos emerge as the viable sub-TeV dark matter candidates if anomaly and modulus mediated contributions to supersymmetry breaking are both competitive. Obtaining the correct relic density in this mass range forces Higgsinos to be produced non-thermally from the decay of a modulus. We outline constraints arising from indirect and direct detection experiments in this context, as well as theoretical constraints such as the overproduction of dark matter from gravitino decay.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the proceedings of CETUP* 201

Photon-Dark Photon Conversions in Background Electromagnetic Fields

The mixing of photons with light pseudoscalars in the presence of external electromagnetic fields has been used extensively to search for axion-like-particles. A similar effect for dark photon propagating states is usually not considered due to the Landau-Yang theorem. We point out that mixing between photon and dark photon propagating states in background electromagnetic fields can indeed occur, in non-linear QED, through a four-photon vertex by integrating out the electron box diagram. Starting from the Schwinger Lagrangian, we derive the equations of motion for dark photons interacting with the Standard Model photon through gauge kinetic terms. We provide expressions for the perpendicular and parallel refractive indices in series expansions in the critical field strength, valid both in the strong and weak background field limits. We then consider mixing between the photon-dark photon propagating system in the presence of pure electric and magnetic background fields, and work out the probability of conversion when the background fields are homogeneous. We indicate outlines of the calculation in the inhomogeneous case, and finally express our results in the active-sterile basis, where we find that the mixing induced by background fields can lead to corrections to the tree-level mixing in the zero field limit that is usually considered to probe such systems. Our results may find applications for probing photon-dark photon conversions in the vicinity of neutron stars and in table-top petawatt laser experiments.Comment: 1+16 pages, added references, probability of conversion given in physical basis, conclusions unchange

Constraining Axion-Like-Particles with Hard X-ray Emission from Magnetars

Axion-like particles (ALPs) produced in the core of a magnetar will convert to photons in the magnetosphere, leading to possible signatures in the hard X-ray band. We perform a detailed calculation of the ALP-to-photon conversion probability in the magnetosphere, recasting the coupled differential equations that describe ALP-photon propagation into a form that is efficient for large scale numerical scans. We show the dependence of the conversion probability on the ALP energy, mass, ALP-photon coupling, magnetar radius, surface magnetic field, and the angle between the magnetic field and direction of propagation. Along the way, we develop an analytic formalism to perform similar calculations in more general $n$-state oscillation systems. Assuming ALP emission rates from the core that are just subdominant to neutrino emission, we calculate the resulting constraints on the ALP mass versus ALP-photon coupling space, taking SGR 1806-20 as an example. In particular, we take benchmark values for the magnetar radius and core temperature, and constrain the ALP parameter space by the requirement that the luminosity from ALP-to-photon conversion should not exceed the total observed luminosity from the magnetar. The resulting constraints are competitive with constraints from helioscope experiments in the relevant part of ALP parameter space.Comment: 1+20 pages, 5 figures, typos fixe