Chiral kinetic theory in the presence of dark photon

Finding signatures of dark matter in transport characteristics of solids would be an important step on the road to detect this illusive component of the mass of our Universe. This is especially important and timely as the experiments designed to directly detect dark matter particles continue to provide negative results. As a first step in this direction we consider topologically nontrivial Weyl or Dirac semimetals and derive the modified kinetic equation taking into account two coupled U(1)-gauge fields, one being the standard Maxwell electromagnetic field and other corresponding to the dark sector. The resulting Boltzmann kinetic equation is modified by the Berry curvature which couples to both visible and dark sector gauge fields. It was revealed that the dark sector induces modifications of transport coefficients due to the appearance of coupling constant between gauge fields and dark sector magnetic field.

Automated summary

Finding signatures of dark matter in transport characteristics of solids is an important step towards detecting this elusive component of the Universe's mass. This is especially relevant as direct detection experiments for dark matter have not yielded positive results. In this study, the authors investigate the transport properties of topologically nontrivial Weyl or Dirac semimetals, taking into account the presence of both a standard electromagnetic field and a dark sector field. They find that the dark sector leads to modifications in the transport coefficients due to the coupling between gauge fields and the dark sector magnetic field.