English

Death and Serious Injury by Dark Matter

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2022-11-01 v5 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Macroscopic dark matter refers to a variety of dark matter candidates that would be expected to (elastically) scatter off of ordinary matter with a large geometric cross-section. A wide range of macro masses MXM_X and cross-sections σX\sigma_X remain unprobed. We show that over a wide region within the unexplored parameter space, collisions of a macro with a human body would result in serious injury or death. We use the absence of such unexplained impacts with a well-monitored subset of the human population to exclude a region bounded by σX108107\sigma_X \geq 10^{-8} - 10^{-7} cm2^2 and MX<50M_X < 50 kg. Our results open a new window on dark matter: the human body as a dark matter detector.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.06674,
  title  = {Death and Serious Injury by Dark Matter},
  author = {Jagjit Singh Sidhu and Robert J Scherrer and Glenn Starkman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.06674},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

9 pages, 2 figure