Related papers: Electric Accumulation of Millicharged Particles
A terrestrial population of room-temperature millicharged particles can arise if they make up a dark matter subcomponent or if they are light enough to be produced in cosmic ray air showers. In a companion paper, we showed that a simple…
Minicharged particles arise in many extensions of the Standard Model. Their contribution to the vacuum polarization modifies Coulomb's law via the Uehling potential. In this note we argue that tests for electromagnetic fifth forces can…
Dark sector particles with small electric charge, or millicharge, (mCPs) may lead to a variety of diverse phenomena in particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Assuming their possible existence, we investigate the accumulation and…
We demonstrate that long-ranged terrestrial electric fields can be used to exclude or discover ultralight bosonic particles with extremely small charge, beyond that probed by astrophysics. Bound condensates of scalar millicharged particles…
We propose a novel idea to discover millicharged particles (mCPs) captured by the earth during its existence. It has been demonstrated that the mCPs accumulation inside the earth leads to the enhancement of its number density much larger…
Millicharged particles are generic in theories of dark sectors. A cosmic or local abundance of them may be produced by the early universe, stellar environments, or the decay or annihilation of dark matter/dark energy. Furthermore, if such…
The simplest cosmologies motivate the consideration of dark matter subcomponents that interact significantly with normal matter. Moreover, such strongly-coupled relics may have evaded detection to date if upon encountering the Earth they…
In clouds of suspended particles (grains, droplets, spheres, crystals, etc.), collisions electrify the particles and the clouds, producing large electric potential differences over large scales. This is seen most spectacularly in the…
Dust emission mechanisms as one aspect of wind-driven particle motion on planetary surfaces are still poorly understood. The microphysics is important though as it determines dust sizes and morphologies which set sedimentation speeds and…
Relativistic millicharged particles ($\chi_q$) have been proposed in various extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics. We consider the scenarios where they are produced at nuclear reactor core and via interactions of cosmic-rays…
The electric fields near the heterogeneous metal/dielectric surface of an atom chip were measured using cold atoms. The atomic sensitivity to electric fields was enhanced by exciting the atoms to Rydberg states that are 10^8 times more…
A method for computing the thermopower in interacting systems is proposed. This approach, which relies on Monte Carlo simulations, is illustrated first for a diatomic chain of hard-point elastically colliding particles and then in the case…
Millicharged particles (mCPs) are hypothesized particles possessing an electric charge that is a fraction of the charge of the electron. We report a search for mCPs with charges $\gtrsim 10^{-4}~e$ that improves sensitivity to their…
The empirical observation of aggregation of dielectric particles under the influence of electrostatic forces lies at the origin of the theory of electricity. The growth of clusters formed of small grains underpins a range of phenomena from…
We demonstrate that the searches for dark sector particles can provide probes of reheating scenarios, focusing on the cosmic millicharge background produced in the early universe. We discuss two types of millicharge particles (mCPs): either…
Millicharged particles are well-motivated dark matter candidates arising in many extensions of the Standard Model. We show that, despite their tiny coupling $e_m$ to photons, millicharged dark matter (mDM) in the Earth's geomagnetic field…
Light millicharged particles can be copiously produced from meson decays in cosmic ray collisions with the atmosphere, leading to detectable signals in large underground neutrino detectors. In this paper we study a new channel for…
Although the energies associated with nuclear reactions are due primarily to interactions involving nuclear forces, the rates and probabilities associated with those reactions are effectively governed by electromagnetic forces. Charges in…
Millicharged particles, proposed by various extensions of the standard model, can be created in pairs by high-energy photons within nuclear reactors and can interact electromagnetically with electrons in matter. Recently, the existence of a…
We discuss a novel detection technique for millicharged dark matter that makes use of existing light-shining-through-wall (LSW) experiments searching for massive dark photons. Since millicharged particles interact with both the visible and…