Related papers: Probing photophobic (rel)axion dark matter
Dark matter is poorly constrained by direct detection experiments at masses below 1 MeV. This is an important target for the next generation of experiments, and several methods have been proposed to probe this mass range. One class of such…
We highlight a new connection between the Standard Model hierarchy problem and the dark matter sector. The key piece is the relaxion field, which besides scanning the Higgs mass and setting the electroweak scale, also constitutes the…
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…
Existence of dark matter indicates the presence of unknown fundamental laws of nature. Ultralight axion-like particles are well-motivated dark matter candidates, emerging naturally from theories of physics at ultrahigh energies. We report…
Cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale is an attractive scenario addressing the gauge hierarchy problem. Its main actor, the relaxion, is a light spin-zero field which dynamically relaxes the Higgs mass with respect to its natural…
Cosmologically stable, light particles that came into thermal contact with the Standard Model in the early universe may persist today as a form of hot dark matter. For relics with masses in the eV range, their role in structure formation…
We show that relaxion, that addresses the hierarchy problem, can account for the observed dark matter (DM) relic density. The setup is similar to the case of axion DM models topped with a dynamical misalignment mechanism. After the…
Motivated by the recent XENON1T results, we explore various new physics models that can be discovered through searches for electron recoils in O(keV)-threshold direct-detection experiments. First, we consider the absorption of light bosons,…
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.,…
A number of proposed and ongoing experiments search for axion dark matter with a mass nearing the limit set by small scale structure (${\cal O} ( 10 ^{ - 21 } {\rm eV} ) $). We consider the late universe cosmology of these models, showing…
We show that the current sensitivities of direct detection experiments have already reached the interesting parameter space of freeze-in dark matter models if the dark sector is in the inelastic dark matter framework and the excited dark…
Light axion-like particles occur in many theories of beyond-Standard-Model physics, and may make up some or all of the universe's dark matter. One of the ways they can couple to the Standard Model is through the electromagnetic $F_{\mu\nu}…
In this Letter, we propose a new possible connection between dark matter relic density and baryon asymmetry of the universe. The portal between standard model sector and dark matter not only controls the relic density and detections of dark…
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…
Minimal atomic dark matter with its distinctive cooling mechanisms offers an instructive framework for understanding the potential impact of dark matter on small-scale structure formation and early cosmology. The model consists of two…
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…
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…
We consider models of light super-weakly interacting cold dark matter, with O(10-100) keV mass, focusing on bosonic candidates such as pseudoscalars and vectors. We analyze the cosmological abundance, the gamma-background created by…
The dark axion portal is a coupling of an axion-like particle to a dark photon kinetically mixed with the visible photon. We show how this portal, when applied to the relaxion, can lead to cosmological relaxation of the weak scale using…
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…