MeV-Scale Dark Matter Deep Underground
Abstract
We demonstrate that current and planned underground neutrino experiments could offer a powerful probe of few-MeV dark matter when combined with a nearby high-intensity low-to-medium energy electron accelerator. This experimental setup, an underground beam-dump experiment, is capable of decisively testing the thermal freeze-out mechanism for several natural dark matter scenarios in this mass range. We present the sensitivity reach in terms of the mass-coupling parameter space of existing and planned detectors, such as Super-K, SNO+, and JUNO, in conjunction with a hypothetical 100 MeV energy accelerator. This setup can also greatly extend the sensitivity of direct searches for new light weakly-coupled force-carriers independently of their connection to dark matter.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1507.02681,
title = {MeV-Scale Dark Matter Deep Underground},
author = {Eder Izaguirre and Gordan Krnjaic and Maxim Pospelov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.02681},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
9 pages, 4 figures