English

Geomagnetic constraints on Millicharged Dark Matter

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-01-13 v2

Abstract

Millicharged particles are well-motivated dark matter candidates arising in many extensions of the Standard Model. We show that, despite their tiny coupling eme_m to photons, millicharged dark matter (mDM) in the Earth's geomagnetic field can generate a quasi-static, monochromatic magnetic signal with angular frequency twice the mDM mass. Using null results from the SuperMAG and SNIPE Hunt collaborations, we constrain the effective charge of bosonic mDM in the mass range 101810^{-18}--1014eV10^{-14}\,\text{eV}. The resulting upper bounds exceed stellar cooling constraints by over thirteen orders of magnitude, demonstrating the power of this method.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.14949,
  title  = {Geomagnetic constraints on Millicharged Dark Matter},
  author = {Ariel Arza and Yuanlin Gong and Jing Shu and Lei Wu and Qiang Yuan and Bin Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.14949},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

7 pages, 2 figures, + Supplemental Materials(7 pages, 3 figures). References and discussions added. Match to accepted version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:17:07.482Z