{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-cosmological-evolution-of-light-dark","title":"The Cosmological Evolution of Light Dark Photon Dark Matter","arxiv_id":"1911.05086","date":"2019-11-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Samuel D. McDermott","Samuel J. Witte"],"abstract":"Light dark photons are subject to various plasma effects, such as Debye screening and resonant oscillations, which can lead to a more complex cosmological evolution than is experienced by conventional cold dark matter candidates. Maintaining a consistent history of dark photon dark matter requires ensuring that the super-thermal abundance present in the early Universe $\\textit{(i)}$ does not deviate significantly after the formation of the CMB, and $\\textit{(ii)}$ does not excessively leak into the Standard Model plasma after BBN. We point out that the role of non-resonant absorption, which has previously been neglected in cosmological studies of this dark matter candidate, produces strong constraints on dark photon dark matter with mass as low as $10^{-22}$ eV. Furthermore, we show that resonant conversion of dark photons after recombination can produce excessive heating of the IGM which is capable of prematurely reionizing hydrogen and helium, leaving a distinct imprint on both the Ly$-\\alpha$ forest and the integrated optical depth of the CMB. Our constraints surpass existing cosmological bounds by more than five orders of magnitude across a wide range of dark photon masses.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05086v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.05086v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-cosmological-evolution-of-light-dark","repo_url":"https://github.com/andrea0292/Dark-Photon-Perturbations","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"the-cosmological-evolution-of-light-dark","repo_url":"https://github.com/smsharma/dark-photons-perturbations","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}