Related papers: Earth-bound Milli-charge Relics
We demonstrate that superconducting radio-frequency cavities can be used to create and detect millicharged particles and are capable of extending the reach to couplings several orders of magnitude beyond other laboratory based constraints.…
We examine the milli-charged dark matter scenario from a string theory perspective. In this scenario, kinetic and mass mixings of the photon with extra U(1) bosons are claimed to give rise to small electric charges, carried by dark matter…
We investigate the detection of composite dark matter that disassembles into a cascade while crossing the Earth. This occurs for loosely bound composite dark matter, where the binding energy per constituent is small, such that scattering…
Strongly-interacting dark matter can be accumulated in large quantities inside the Earth, and for dark matter particles in a few GeV mass range, it can exist in large quantities near the Earth's surface. We investigate the constraints…
We compute the thermalization of a hidden sector consisting of minicharged fermions (MCPs) and massless hidden photons in the early Universe. The precise measurement of the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by Planck and…
We explore the stopping effect that results from interactions between dark matter and nuclei as the dark matter particles travel undergound towards the detector. Although this effect is negligible for heavy dark matter particles, there is…
New physics scenarios beyond the Standard Model predict the existence of milli-charged particles. So far, only spin-1/2 and spin-0 milli-charged particles have been considered in literature, leaving out the interesting case of spin-1. We…
Dark matter sectors with hidden interactions have been of much interest in recent years. These frameworks include models of millicharged particles as well as dark sector bound states, whose constituents have electromagnetic gauge…
We consider nuclear gamma decays and $\gamma$-emitting reactions that can be an efficient source of hypothetical millicharged particles ($\chi$). In particular, we revisit the production of millicharged particles in nuclear reactor…
Over the last few years it has become increasingly clear that low energy, but high precision experiments provide a powerful and complementary window to physics beyond the Standard Model. In this note we illuminate this by using minicharged…
Approximately 60 years after the Milligan oil drop experiment in 1909, fractionally charged particles (FCPs) were reported to have been discovered in air-shower cores, and the search for FCPs continues to the present day in space,…
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 may be charged under dark electromagnetism with a dark photon that kinetically mixes with the Standard Model photon. In this framework, dark matter will collect at the center of the Earth and annihilate into dark photons, which…
In this paper, we propose an experiment, LANSCE-mQ, aiming to detect fractionally charged and millicharged particles (mCP) using an 800 MeV proton beam fixed target at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) facility. This search can…
The majority of the matter in the universe is still unidentified and under investigation by both direct and indirect means. Many experiments searching for the recoil of dark-matter particles off target nuclei in underground laboratories…
Some models of inelastic dark matter posit the existence of bound states under some new $U(1)'$ gauge symmetry. If this new dark photon kinetically mixes with the standard model photon, then the constituent particles in these bound states…
After a brief review of different types of scenarios suggested for the solution of the problem of galactic and intergalactic magnetic field generation, the mechanism based on the electric current induction by hypothetical millicharged…
We examine the possibility that dark matter consists of charged massive particles (CHAMPs) in view of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. The evolution of cosmological perturbations of CHAMP with other components is followed…
We study a new dark sector signature for an atomic process of "rearrangement" in the galaxy. In this process, a hydrogen-like atomic dark matter state together with its anti-particle can rearrange to form a highly-excited bound state. This…
The critical charge $Z_c$ is estimated for elementary particles using a Newton-Wigner position operator inspired model. Particles with $Z \sim Z_c$ (maxicharged particles), if they exist at all, can have unusual properties which turn them…