Related papers: Atomic limits in the search for galactic dark matt…
Dark matter particles populating our galactic halo could be directly detected by measuring their scattering off target nuclei or electrons in a suitable detector. As this interaction is expected to occur with very low probability and would…
Astronomical and cosmological observations of the past 80 years build solid evidence that atomic matter makes up only a small fraction of the matter in the universe. The dominant fraction does not interact with electromagnetic radiation,…
Direct detection of light dark matter (DM), below the GeV scale, through electron recoil can be efficient if DM has a velocity well above the virial value of $v\sim 10^{-3}$. We point out that if there is a long range attractive force…
The primary observable in dark matter direct detection is the spectrum of scattering events. We simulate multiple positive direct detection signals (on germanium, xenon, and argon targets) to explore the extent to which the underlying…
The identification of the nature of dark matter is one of the most important problems confronting particle physics. Current observational constraints permit the mass of the dark matter to range from $10^{-22}$ eV - $10^{48}$ GeV. Given the…
We present new observational constraints on the elastic scattering of dark matter with electrons for dark matter masses between 10 keV and 1 TeV. We consider scenarios in which the momentum-transfer cross section has a power-law dependence…
We consider the possibility that the cosmological dark matter consists of particles very close in mass to new colored particles below the TeV scale. While such a scenario is inherently difficult to directly confirm at colliders, we find…
Germanium is the detector material of choice in many rare-event searches looking for low-energy nuclear recoils induced by dark matter particles or neutrinos. We perform a systematic exploration of its quenching factor for sub-keV nuclear…
If dark matter has mass lower than around 1 GeV, it will not impart enough energy to cause detectable nuclear recoils in many direct-detection experiments. However, if dark matter is upscattered to high energy by collisions with cosmic…
Identifying the nature of dark matter (DM) has long been a pressing question for particle physics. In the face of ever-more-powerful exclusions and null results from large-exposure searches for TeV-scale DM interacting with nuclei, a…
We show, by using an extensive sample of viable supersymmetric models as templates, that indirect detection of dark matter through gamma rays may have a large potential for identifying the nature of dark matter. This is in particular true…
The mass of the dark matter particle is unknown, and may be as low as ~$10^{-22}$ eV. The lighter part of this range, below ~eV, is relatively unexplored both theoretically and experimentally but contains an array of natural dark matter…
The dark-matter candidates of particle physics invariably possess electromagnetic interactions, if only via quantum fluctuations. Taken en masse, dark matter can thus engender an index of refraction which deviates from its vacuum value. Its…
At a level too faint for astronomy, particle dark matter may interact with Standard Model states via the photon. We derive limits from direct detection experiments on photon-mediated nuclear interactions up to operator dimension-6, viz.,…
Dark matter in spiral galaxies like the Milky Way may take the form of a dark plasma. Hidden sector dark matter charged under an unbroken $U(1)'$ gauge interaction provides a simple and well defined particle physics model realising this…
Dark matter detectors built primarily to probe elastic scattering of WIMPs on nuclei are also precise probes of light, weakly coupled particles that may be absorbed by the detector material. In this paper, we derive constraints on the…
There has been renewed interest in the possibility that dark matter exists in the form of atoms, analogous to those of the visible world. An important input for understanding the cosmological consequences of dark atoms is their…
Constraints on the indirect detection of dark matter are usually obtained from observations of astrophysical objects -- the Galactic Center, dwarf galaxies, M31, etc. Here we propose instead to look for the annihilation or decay of dark…
The recoil threshold of Direct Detection experiments limits the mass range of Dark Matter (DM) particles that can be detected, with most DD experiments being blind to sub-MeV DM particles. However, these light DM particles can be boosted to…
Dark matter pair production at high energy colliders may leave observable signatures in the energy and momentum spectra of the objects recoiling against the dark matter. We use LEP data on mono-photon events with large missing energy to…