Schwinger dark matter production

Building on recently constructed inflationary vector dark matter production mechanisms as well as studies of magnetogenesis, we show that an inflationary dark Schwinger mechanism can generate the observed dark matter relic abundance for `dark electron' masses as light as ∼ 0.1 eV and as heavy as 1012 GeV. The dark matter can interact very weakly via the exchange of light dark photons with a power spectrum which is peaked at very small scales, thus evading isocurvature constraints. This mechanism is viable even when (purely) gravitational particle production is negligible. Thus dark matter can be produced solely via the Schwinger effect during inflation including for light masses.