The Photon Paradox: Why Dark Matter May Be Hidden in Ordinary Light

This preprint presents the Photon Paradox framework, a novel theoretical approach in which dark matter emerges from the hidden gravitational mass of ordinary photons via string-scale entanglement with the Higgs field. A transient early-universe scalar field (the Genesis Field λ_φ) provides the necessary dark matter density during the epoch of structure formation. 

At later times, this component gradually transitions into the photon-string-Higgs (PSH) mechanism, which dominates the present-day dark matter budget without requiring new elementary particles.



Version 1.5 introduces significant improvements:


- Three new figures illustrating the cosmological evolution:

 
  • Figure 1: Evolution of Energy in the PSH Model

  • Figure 2: Dark Matter Evolution – Relative Contributions and Total Energy Density

  • Figure 3: Late-Universe Development (z=5 to z=0) of dark matter via the PSH mechanism


- New subsection 3.2: "Dark Matter Abundance from Photon-String-Higgs Coupling" with explicit calculation of the required effective photon mass and total dark matter budget.


- Updated Discussion with extended comparison to current dark matter models (including SIDM, WIMPs, axions, and modified gravity).



The model aims to naturally reproduce the observed Ω_DM ≈ 0.27 and Ω_DM/Ω_b ≈ 5.5 while offering testable predictions for astrophysical transients and laboratory experiments.