Self-interacting Spin-2 Dark Matter

Abstract

Recent developments in bigravity allow one to construct consistent theories of interacting spin-2 particles that are free of ghosts. In this framework, we propose an elementary spin-2 dark matter candidate with a mass well below the TeV scale. We show that, in a certain regime where the interactions induced by the spin-2 fields do not lead to large departures from the predictions of general relativity, such a light dark matter particle typically self-interacts and undergoes self-annihilations via 3-to-2 processes. We discuss its production mechanisms and also identify the regions of the parameter space where self-interactions can alleviate the discrepancies at small scales between the predictions of the collisionless dark matter paradigm and cosmological N-body simulations.