Could Dark Matter Be Made of Heavy Axions After All?
Dark matter might not need to be made of tiny, lightweight axions after all. This paper shows that much heavier axions, once thought too unstable, could survive to the present day and account for dark matter. Axions, hypothetical particles that barely interact with light, are a primary candidate for dark matter. Scientists believed axions had to be very light, since heavier ones would decay too quickly into photons and disappear. Our new study challenges this view. We propose a new force, similar to the one that forges protons, able to hold together "dark gluons" into stable clumps called glueballs.
Artistic representation of a dark matter glueball and its feeble interaction with photons, represented as wiggly lines.
These glueballs behave like axion dark matter but can be far heavier than ordinary axions. Their stability comes from an exotic dark fermion, which connects the glueballs to light, but only very weakly: just enough to prevent rapid decay and make them potentially detectable by future telescopes. This discovery broadens the search for dark matter, suggesting it could be made of heavy axions shaped by unknown forces acting in the dark sector of physics.
