English

Boosted dark matter from semi-annihilations in the galactic center

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-04-08 v2

Abstract

In some scenarios, the dark matter relic abundance is set by the semi-annihilation of two dark matter particles into one dark matter particle and one Standard Model particle. These semi-annihilations might still be occurring today in the Galactic Center at a significant rate, generating a flux of boosted dark matter particles. We investigate the possible signals of this flux component in direct detection and neutrino experiments for sub-GeV dark matter masses. We show that for typical values of the semi-annihilation cross-section, the sensitivity of current experiments to the spin-independent dark matter-proton scattering cross-section can be several orders of magnitude larger than current constraints from cosmic-ray boosted dark matter. We also argue that the upcoming DARWIN and DUNE experiments may probe scattering cross-sections as low as 1037cm210^{-37}\,{\rm cm}^2 for masses between 30 MeV and 1 GeV.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.12117,
  title  = {Boosted dark matter from semi-annihilations in the galactic center},
  author = {Boris Betancourt Kamenetskaia and Motoko Fujiwara and Alejandro Ibarra and Takashi Toma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12117},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

12 pages, 2 figures. Published in PLB