Eur. Phys. J. C (2018) 78: 520
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-6005-8

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Dark matter in quantum gravity

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QH, UK
² PRISMA Cluster of Excellence and Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics, Johannes Gutenberg University, 55099, Mainz, Germany
³ Dubna State University, Universitetskaya str. 19, Dubna, 141982, Russia

^* e-mail: x.calmet@sussex.ac.uk

Received: 24 March 2018
Accepted: 20 June 2018
Published online: 25 June 2018

Abstract

We show that quantum gravity, whatever its ultra-violet completion might be, could account for dark matter. Indeed, besides the massless gravitational field recently observed in the form of gravitational waves, the spectrum of quantum gravity contains two massive fields respectively of spin 2 and spin 0. If these fields are long-lived, they could easily account for dark matter. In that case, dark matter would be very light and only gravitationally coupled to the standard model particles.