Superconducting Dark Matter

 

Dr Alexander Vikman
Central European Institute for Cosmology and Fundamental Physics,
The Czech Academy of Sciences

12 Apr 2018 (Thursday)
2:00 pm
IAS2042, 2/F, Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST

The speaker extends the recently proposed mimetic dark matter (DM) and the dust of dark energy (DE) models to a U(1)-charged gauged scalar field. This extension yields a mass to the photon via the abelian Higgs mechanism. The square of this photon mass is proportional to the DM energy density. Thus, dense DM environments can screen the dark vector force. There is a substantial freedom in this gauged extension of the irrotational fluid-like DM. This freedom enables one to model the classical London equation of superconductivity or to obtain the photon mass, which remains constant during the matter-dominated époque.