Spin-2 dark matter from inflation (2305.13381v2)

Abstract: The seed of dark matter can be generated from light spectator fields during inflation through a similar mechanism that the seed of observed large scale structures are produced from the inflaton field. The accumulated energy density of the corresponding excited modes, which is subdominant during inflation, dominates energy density of the universe later around the time of matter and radiation equality and plays the role of dark matter. For spin-2 spectator fields, Higuchi bound may seem to prevent excitation of such light modes since deviation of the inflationary background from the exact de Sitter spacetime is very small. However, sizable interactions with the inflaton field breaks (part of) isometries of the de Sitter space in the inflationary background and relaxes the Higuchi bound. Looking for this possibility in the context of effective field theory of inflation, we suggest a dark matter model consisting of spin-2 particles that produce during inflation.