A Dark Matter Fermionic Quantum Fluid from Standard Model Dynamics

Abstract

We present a model of dark matter as a superconducting fluid of Cooper pairs of right handed neutrinos or of vector-like quarks. The superconducting dark matter is induced by attractive channels in the Standard Model Higgs and color sectors of the Standard Model, respectively. We show that, for each case, the solution to the gap equation provides viable dark matter candidates for suitable chemical potential values. The mechanism yields an ultra-light neutrino condensate with a mass of $m_{\rm DM} \sim 10^{-19} \text{eV}$ or a vector-like quark condensate with wide range of possible masses. Both cosmological and particle physics constraints on the model lead to a connection between the number of effective relativistic species $N_{\rm eff}$, and the chemical potential and CMB temperature at the time of fermion creation. We also find a relation between the superconducting fermion and baryon densities, with implications for the coincidence between the dark matter and baryon densities in standard cosmology. Given the natural $\text{eV}$ scale of neutrinos, this mechanism may have implications for the Hubble tension.