Related papers: Elastically Decoupling Dark Matter
If dark matter was produced in the early Universe by the decoupling of its annihilations into known particles, there is a sharp experimental target for the size of its coupling. We show that if dark matter was produced by inelastic…
We estimate the maximum direct detection cross section for sub-GeV dark matter (DM) scattering off nucleons. For DM masses in the range $10 \text{ keV }- 100 \text{ MeV}$, cross sections greater than $10^{-36}$- $10^{-30} \,\text{cm}^2$…
Dark matter (DM) as a thermal relic of the primordial plasma is increasingly pressured by direct and indirect searches, while the same production mechanism in a decoupled sector is much less constrained. We extend the standard treatment of…
Inelastic dark matter (IDM) models feature an energy threshold for scattering with Standard Model particles, which enables their consistency with the increasingly stringent limits placed by direct detection experiments. In a typical…
We explore the phenomenology of a class of models where the dark matter particle can inelastically up-scatter to a heavier excited state via off-diagonal dipolar interactions with the interstellar plasma (gas or free electrons). The heavier…
The identity of dark matter is being sought with increasingly sensitive and voluminous underground detectors. Recently the XENON1T collaboration reported excess electronic recoil events, with most of these having recoil energies around…
Dark matter candidates comprising several sub-states separated by a small mass gap, and coupled to the Standard Model by (sub-)GeV force carriers, can exhibit non-trivial scattering interactions in direct detection experiments. We analyze…
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 propose a new thermal dark matter candidate whose abundance is determined by the freezeout of inverse decays. The relic abundance depends parametrically only on a decay width, while matching the observed value requires that the coupling…
Detection of electron recoils by dark matter (DM) may reveal the structure of the dark sector. We consider a scenario where a heavier DM particle inelastically scatters off an electron and is converted into a lighter DM particle. A small…
We consider a model of dark matter where the mediator corresponds to a superposition of a scalar and pseudoscalar, and the scenario where, after reheating, the number densities of the dark sector particles, i.e. the dark matter and the…
Thermal relic dark matter particles with a mass of 31-40 GeV and that dominantly annihilate to bottom quarks have been shown to provide an excellent description of the excess gamma rays observed from the center of the Milky Way. Flavored…
Dark matter (DM) and neutrinos are the two most compelling pieces of evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics but these are often treated as belonging to two different sectors. Yet DM-neutrino interactions are…
Dark matter is a vital component of the current best model of our universe, $\Lambda$CDM. There are leading candidates for what the dark matter could be (e.g. weakly-interacting massive particles, or axions), but no compelling observational…
The early kinetic decoupling (eKD) effect is an inevitable ingredient in calculating the relic density of dark matter (DM) for various well-motivated scenarios. It appears naturally in forbidden dark matter annihilation, the main focus of…
A simple and well-motivated explanation for the origin of dark matter is that it consists of thermal relic particles that get their mass entirely through electroweak symmetry breaking. The simplest models implementing this possibility…
We report on recent progress in the search for dark matter particles with masses from 1 MeV to 1 GeV. Several dark matter candidates in this mass range are expected to generate measurable electronic-recoil signals in direct-detection…
Dark matter (DM) particles with mass in the sub-GeV range are an attractive alternative to heavier weakly-interacting massive particles, but direct detection of such light particles is challenging. If however DM-nucleus scattering leads to…
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…
Calculating the abundance of thermally produced dark matter particles has become a standard procedure, with sophisticated methods guaranteeing a precision that matches the percent-level accuracy in the observational determination of the…