PREPRINT
3C314384-2E44-438E-B0DD-009C304B22F0

Direct detection of dark photon dark matter using radio telescopes

Haipeng An, Shuailiang Ge, Wen-Qing Guo, Xiaoyuan Huang, Jia Liu, Zhiyao Lu
arXiv:2207.05767

Submitted on 12 July 2022

Abstract

Dark photon can be the ultralight dark matter candidate, which can interact with the Standard Model particles via the kinetic mixing. We propose to look for ultralight dark photon dark matter (DPDM) with local absorption at the radio telescope. The DPDM induces an harmonic oscillation of the electrons in the antenna of a radio telescope, which induces a monochromatic radio signal, and will be recorded by the telescope detectors. We show that with this method, the upper limit from the observation data of the FAST telescope on the kinetic mixing can already reach ${10}^{-12}$ for DPDM with oscillation frequency range $1-1.5$ GHz, stronger than the CMB constraint by about one order of magnitude. We also show that with large scale interferometric arrays the LOFAR and SKA1 telescopes can achieve extraordinary sensitivities for DPDM from 10 MHz to 10 GHz, and provide a competing and complementary method to search for DPDM directly.

Preprint

Comment: 4.5 pages + appendix, 11 figures

Subjects: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics; Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena; High Energy Physics - Experiment