Speaker
Description
The microscopic identity of dark matter and the smallness of the observed
vacuum energy remain two central puzzles in cosmology. I present a framework in which both questions are tied to a single additional gauge sector. In four spacetime dimensions, a three-form gauge field has a four-form field strength with no local propagating degrees of freedom. Instead, it labels distinct vacuum-energy branches. Such sectors have long been used in approaches to the cosmological constant problem, including vacuum-energy selection, relaxation, sequestering, and flux scanning. The proposal discussed here is a minimal extension of this idea: the same three-form sector can also support stable particle-like remnants.
Charged membranes can interpolate between different four-form branches. When the membrane worldvolume carries conserved monopole flux, collapse need not end in the trivial vacuum. The endpoint can instead be a finite-energy localized remnant. We call these objects topolons. They are neither elementary particles, ordinary solitons, nor primordial black holes. They are nonperturbative vacuum-remnant dark matter candidates.
I discuss how topolons can be produced during quasi-de Sitter inflation through thermal activation associated with the Gibbons-Hawking temperature, and how their abundance evolves through reheating to the present epoch. For high-scale inflationary benchmarks, the observed dark matter abundance can be reproduced by an ultraheavy population dominated by the unit-flux sector. The relics are effectively cold by the onset of structure formation. Linear cosmological tests, including CMB spectra, CMB lensing, projected density and lensing spectra, matter power spectra, and temperature-source contributions, show no detectable departure from the standard cold dark matter baseline. The framework therefore offers a conservative route in which dark matter and vacuum energy are both connected to one three-form gauge sector.