Dark Photon Dark Matter from a Network of Cosmic Strings

Abstract

We study the production of ultra-light dark photons from a network of near-global, Abelian-Higgs cosmic strings. We find that dark photons produced in this way are nonrelativistic today and can make up all of the dark matter for dark photon masses as small as $m_A\sim 10^{-22}\mathrm{eV}$.

Comments: v2: 10 pages, 2 figures; extended discussion of string network scaling; matches PRD