Related papers: Light Dark Matter from Inelastic Cosmic Ray Collis…
Dark matter might be in the form of a dark plasma in the Milky Way halo. Specifically, we consider here a hidden sector consisting of a light `dark electron' and a much heavier `dark proton', each charged under an unbroken $U(1)'$ gauge…
Direct detection of nuclear recoils due to sub-GeV dark matter is challenging because of the small kinetic energy of the light dark matter particles. Although limits down to a few hundred MeV have been reached using specially designed low…
Astrophysical dark matter particles with masses well below GeV-scale can be difficult to detect using conventional nuclear recoil experiments due to their low velocities in our Milky Way halo. Elastic scattering with high-energy cosmic rays…
We show that the momentum dependence of dark matter interactions with nuclei can be probed in direct detection experiments without knowledge of the dark matter velocity distribution. This is one of the few properties of DM microphysics that…
The direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter interacting with nucleons is hampered by the low recoil energies induced by scatterings in the detectors. This experimental difficulty is avoided in the scenario of boosted dark matter where a…
We revisit the signatures from collisions of cosmic-rays on sub-GeV dark matter (DM) in the Milky Way. In addition to the upscattered DM component that can be probed by existing DM and neutrino experiments widely discussed, we examine the…
Direct detection experiments turn to lose sensitivity of searching for a sub-MeV light dark matter candidate due to the threshold of recoil energy. However, such light dark matter particles can be accelerated by energetic cosmic-rays such…
We consider the sensitivity of fixed-target neutrino experiments at the luminosity frontier to light stable states, such as those present in models of MeV-scale dark matter. To ensure the correct thermal relic abundance, such states must…
We study the possibility to directly detect the boosted dark matter generated from the scatterings with high energetic cosmic particles such as protons and electrons. As a concrete example, we consider the sub-GeV dark matter mediated by a…
We consider searches for the inelastic scattering of low-mass dark matter at direct detection experiments, using the Migdal effect. We find that there are degeneracies between the dark matter mass and the mass splitting that are difficult…
Dark matter collisions with heavy nuclei (Xe, Ge, Si, Na) may produce recoils observable at direct-search experiments. Given that some of these experiments are yielding conflicting information, however, it is worth asking if physics other…
We examine the recently-reported low-energy electron recoil spectrum observed at the XENON1T underground dark matter direct detection experiment, in the context of new interactions with solar neutrinos. In particular we show that scalar and…
GeV-scale dark matter particles with strong coupling to baryons evade the standard direct detection limits as they are efficiently stopped in the overburden and, consequently, are not able to reach the underground detectors. On the other…
The non-detection of GeV-scale WIMPs has led to increased interest in more general candidates, including sub-GeV dark matter. Direct detection experiments, despite their high sensitivity to WIMPs, are largely blind to sub-GeV dark matter.…
It has been suggested that dark matter particles which scatter inelastically from detector target nuclei could explain the apparent incompatibility of the DAMA modulation signal (interpreted as evidence for particle dark matter) with the…
Traditional direct searches for dark matter, looking for nuclear recoils in deep underground detectors, are challenged by an almost complete loss of sensitivity for light dark matter particles. Consequently, there is a significant effort in…
In light of the excess in the low-energy electron recoil events reported by XENON1T, many new physics scenarios have been proposed as a possible origin of the excess. One possible explanation is that the excess is a result of a fast moving…
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 analyze the direct detection signals of a toy model consisting of a Dirac dark matter particle which couples to one Standard Model fermion via a scalar mediator. For all scenarios, the dark matter particle scatters off nucleons via one…
We study the direct detection prospects for a representative set of simplified models of sub-GeV dark matter (DM), accounting for existing terrestrial, astrophysical and cosmological constraints. We focus on dark matter lighter than an MeV,…