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Direct constraints on charged excitations of dark matter

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2013-01-15 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Experiment Nuclear Experiment

Abstract

If the neutral component of weak-scale dark matter is accompanied by a charged excitation separated by a mass gap of less than ~20 MeV, WIMPs can form stable bound states with nuclei. We show that the recent progress in experiments searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay sets the first direct constraint on the exoergic reaction of WIMP-nucleus bound state formation. We calculate the rate for such process in representative models and show that the double-beta decay experiments provide unique sensitivity to a large fraction of parameter space of the WIMP doublet model, complementary to constraints imposed by cosmology and direct collider searches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1209.6358,
  title  = {Direct constraints on charged excitations of dark matter},
  author = {Haipeng An and Maxim Pospelov and Josef Pradler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1209.6358},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

Final version. Published in PRL 109, 251302 (2012)