Detecting Light Dark Matter via Inelastic Cosmic Ray Collisions

Alvey, James; Campos, Miguel; Fairbairn, Malcolm; You, Tevong

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.261802

Detecting Light Dark Matter via Inelastic Cosmic Ray Collisions

James Alvey
(
- King's Coll. London
)
,
Miguel Campos
(
- King's Coll. London
)
,
Malcolm Fairbairn
(
- King's Coll. London
)
,
Tevong You
(
- Cambridge U., DAMTP and
- Cambridge U.
)

May 14, 2019

5 pages

Published in:

Phys.Rev.Lett. 123 (2019) 261802

Published: Jan 1, 2020

e-Print:

1905.05776 [hep-ph]

DOI:

10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.261802

Report number:

Cavendish-HEP-19/08,
DAMTP-2019-21,
KCL-PH-TH-2019-45

View in:

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Abstract: (APS)

Direct detection experiments relying on nuclear recoil signatures lose sensitivity to sub-GeV dark matter for typical galactic velocities. This sensitivity is recovered if there exists another source of flux with higher momenta. Such an energetic flux of light dark matter could originate from the decay of mesons produced in inelastic cosmic ray collisions. We compute this novel production mechanism—a cosmic beam dump experiment—and estimate the resulting limits from XENON1T and LZ. We find that the dark matter flux from inelastic cosmic rays colliding with atmospheric nuclei can dominate over the flux from elastic collisions with relic dark matter. The limits that we obtain for hadrophilic scalar mediator models are competitive with those from MiniBoone for light MeV-scale mediator masses.

Note:

5 pages, 4 figures

Elementary Particles and Fields
dark matter: scattering
dark matter: flux
dark matter: direct detection
cosmic radiation
nucleus: recoil
nucleus: atmosphere
sensitivity
beam dump
XENON

References(30)

Figures(4)

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