Dark Photons

[BeAChooser]

The mainstream zoo of gnomes just gets wackier and wackier ...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.08843

Quasi-degenerate dark photon and dark matter

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While one of the dark gauge bosons becomes a dark photon, the others can keep stable to form a dark matter particle. The nearly degenerate masses of dark photon and dark matter could be tested if the dark photon and the dark matter are both observed in the future.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.09063

A closer look at dark photon explanations of the excess radio background

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The observed excess radio background has remained a puzzle for over a decade. A recent new physics solution involves dark matter that decays into dark photons in the presence of a thermal dark photon background.

[crawler]

This appears to accord with my idea that free photons can become confined photons & make electrons etc.
And that free neutrinos (pairs of photons) can become confined neutrinos & make dark electrons etc.

[jackokie]

@crawler I assume you're talking about "normal" photons and neutrinos, not dark, light, speckled, or fuchsia. Seriously, what sorts of experiments do you envision to test your hypothesis?

[BeAChooser]

Seriously, what sorts of experiments do you envision to test your hypothesis?

Note that I've already posted on other threads about several experiments that have failed to find the curious creatures.

[jackokie]

@BeAChooser I went looking through your posts to find the experiments you reference, ended up on a back-and-forth thread between @Michael mozina, @Paladin, and @Higgsy that shed no light, and decided that the dispositive experiments weren't germane to my question anyway. My interests are in things that are testable, so if say, @crawler posits a physical entity or relationship, my interest is 1) if it is testable, and 2) if the proponent has considered what tests (experiments) would support the hypothesis. One would hope the proponent has already taken into account any tests that were dispositive, and why, in the design of his or her experiments.

I think wading through the comments of both Lerner's and Keating's videos has made me violently allergic to things that can't be tested. I'm not saying the forum should only focus on testable hypotheses, far from it. It's just that if I don't limit my exposure to them, for a while anyway, I'm afraid I'll come down with a bad case of hives.

[crawler]

@crawler I assume you're talking about "normal" photons and neutrinos, not dark, light, speckled, or fuchsia. Seriously, what sorts of experiments do you envision to test your hypothesis?

I feel sure that i hav been here before. I never did like the idea that neutrinos exist. But, if they do, then when confined (ie when they form loops), neutrinos would make dark matter.
I mentioned dark electrons. No. Electrons (if they exist) hav charge. Dark electrons etc would not have any charge. Hence dark matter made of dark neutrinos would simply gravitate to form clumps of dark matter (eg like small neutrino stars)(if they exist).

But re what tests might test the existence of neutrinos or dark photons or dark matter -- dunno.

[BeAChooser]

Wackier and wackier …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10827

Kinematically forbidden channels can set the freeze-out dark matter (DM) relic abundance. These channels are described by DM annihilations into heavier states, which vanish at zero temperature limit, but occur at finite temperatures in the early Universe. For the case that the final state of the forbidden channel is scalar mediators that couple to Standard Model (SM) matter through mixing with the SM Higgs, the signals from DM-nucleon interactions and from mediator-related missing energy or displaced vertices could be detected by direct detections and particle physics experiments, respectively. We thus present a study on the simplest secluded vector dark matter model that can exhibit this scenario in the mass range from sub-GeV to TeV. The dark matter resides in the hidden sector, which is in thermal equilibrium with the SM before freeze-out. During freeze-out, the depletion of its density results from its annihilation into two heavier but metastable scalars, where the coupling can be determined by having the correct relic density and constrained by the perturbative unitarity bound. However, much of the allowed parameter space is insensitive to the mixing angle between the hidden scalar and SM Higgs. We find that a more significant mass splitting between DM and the mediator can be allowed only in the sub-GeV region. This model of the forbidden DM interacting with SM particles through the scalar portal is testable in experiments.