Earth-Scattering Induced Modulation in Low-Threshold Dark Matter Experiments
Abstract
Dark matter particles with sufficiently large interactions with ordinary matter can scatter in the Earth before reaching and scattering in a detector. This induces a modulation in the signal rate with a period of one sidereal day. We calculate this modulation for sub-GeV dark matter particles that interact either with a heavy or an ultralight dark-photon mediator and investigate the resulting signal in low-threshold detectors consisting of silicon, xenon, or argon targets. The scattering in the Earth is dominated by dark matter scatters off nuclei, while the signal in the detector is easiest to observe from dark matter scattering off electrons. We investigate the properties of the modulation signal and provide projections of the sensitivity of future experiments. We find that a search for a modulation signal can probe new regions of parameter space near the energy thresholds of current experiments, where the data are typically dominated by backgrounds.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.00344,
title = {Earth-Scattering Induced Modulation in Low-Threshold Dark Matter Experiments},
author = {Xavier Bertou and Ansh Desai and Timon Emken and Rouven Essig and Tomer Volansky and Tien-Tien Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.00344},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
23 pages + 22 with appendices/references, 33 figures. v2: Minor clarifications, matches version published in JHEP