Abstract
Recent work has suggested that an additional per baryon of heating in the intergalactic medium is needed to reconcile hydrodynamical simulations with Lyman- forest absorption line widths at redshift . Resonant conversion of dark photon dark matter into low frequency photons is a viable source of such heating. We perform the first hydrodynamical simulations including dark photon heating and show that dark photons with mass and kinetic mixing can alleviate the heating excess. A prediction of this model is a nonstandard thermal history for underdense gas at .
- Received 6 July 2022
- Revised 13 September 2022
- Accepted 13 October 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.211102
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Focus
Dark Matter as an Intergalactic Heat Source
Published 18 November 2022
Spectra from quasars suggest that intergalactic gas may have been heated by a form of dark matter called dark photons.
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