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Caputo, A., Regis, M., & Taoso, M. (2020). Searching for sterile neutrino with X-ray intensity mapping. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 03(3), 001–21pp.
Abstract: The cosmological X-ray emission associated to the possible radiative decay of sterile neutrinos is composed by a collection of lines at different energies. For a given mass, each line corresponds to a given redshift. In this work, we cross correlate such line emission with catalogs of galaxies tracing the dark matter distribution at different redshifts. We derive observational prospects by correlating the X-ray sky that will be probed by the eROSITA and Athena missions with current and near future photometric and spectroscopic galaxy surveys. A relevant and unexplored fraction of the parameter space of sterile neutrinos can be probed by this technique.
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Caputo, A., Esposito, A., Geoffray, E., Polosa, A. D., & Sun, S. C. (2020). Dark matter, dark photon and superfluid He-4 from effective field theory. Phys. Lett. B, 802, 135258–6pp.
Abstract: We consider a model of sub-GeV dark matter whose interaction with the Standard Model is mediated by a new vector boson (the dark photon) which couples kinetically to the photon. We describe the possibility of constraining such a model using a superfluid He-4 detector, by means of an effective theory for the description of the superfluid phonon. We find that such a detector could provide bounds that are competitive with other direct detection experiments only for ultralight vector mediator, in agreement with previous studies. As a byproduct we also present, for the first time, the low-energy effective field theory for the interaction between photons and phonons.
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Blas, D., Caputo, A., Ivanov, M. M., & Sberna, L. (2020). No chiral light bending by clumps of axion-like particles. Phys. Dark Universe, 27, 100428–4pp.
Abstract: We study the propagation of light in the presence of a parity-violating coupling between photons and axion-like particles (ALPs). Naively, this interaction could lead to a split of light rays into two separate beams of different polarization chirality and with different refraction angles. However, by using the eikonal method we explicitly show that this is not the case and that ALP clumps do not produce any spatial birefringence. This happens due to non-trivial variations of the photon's frequency and wavevector, which absorb time-derivatives and gradients of the ALP field. We argue that these variations represent a new way to probe the ALP-photon coupling with precision frequency measurements.
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Caputo, A., Esposito, A., & Polosa, A. D. (2019). Sub-MeV dark matter and the Goldstone modes of superfluid helium. Phys. Rev. D, 100(11), 116007–6pp.
Abstract: We show how a relativistic effective field theory for the superfluid phase of 4 He can replace the standard methods used to compute the production rates of low-momentum excitations due to the interaction with an external probe. This is done by studying the scattering problem of a light dark matter particle in the superfluid and comparing to some existing results. We show that the rate of emission of two phonons, the Goldstone modes of the effective theory, gets strongly suppressed for sub-MeV dark matter particles due to a fine cancellation between two different tree-level diagrams in the limit of small exchanged momenta. This phenomenon is found to be a consequence of the particular choice of the potential felt by the dark matter particle in helium. The predicted rates can vary by orders of magnitude if this potential is changed. We prove that the dominant contribution to the total emission rate is provided by excitations in the phonon branch. Finally, we analyze the angular distributions for the emissions of one and two phonons and discuss how they can be used to measure the mass of the hypothetical dark matter particle hitting the helium target.
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Caputo, A. (2019). Radiative axion inflation. Phys. Lett. B, 797, 134824–7pp.
Abstract: Planck data robustly exclude the simple lambda phi(4) scenario for inflation. This is also the case for models of “Axion Inflation” in which the inflaton field is the radial part of the Peccei-Quinn complex scalar field. In this letter we show that for the KSVZ model it is possible to match the data taking into account radiative corrections to the tree level potential. After writing down the 1-loop Coleman-Weinberg potential, we show that a radiative plateau is easily generated thanks to the fact that the heavy quarks are charged under SU(3)(c) in order to solve the strong CP problem. We also give a numerical example for which the inflationary observables are computed and the heavy quarks are predicted to have a mass m(Q) greater than or similar to 10(2) TeV.
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