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 and cross-sections 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 cm and 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