Limits on the luminance of dark matter from xenon recoil data

Collaboration
May 17, 2023
4 pages
Published in:
  • Nature 618 (2023) 7963, 47-50
  • Published: May 17, 2023
Experiments:

Citations per year

20222023202401017
Abstract: (Springer)
It is commonly conjectured that dark matter is a charge neutral fundamental particle. However, it may still have minute photon-mediated interactions through millicharge1,2^{1,2} or higher-order multipole interactions310^{3–10}, resulting from new physics at a high energy scale. Here we report a direct search for effective electromagnetic interactions between dark matter and xenon nuclei that produce a recoil of the latter from the PandaX-4T xenon-based detector11,12^{11,12}. Using this technique, the first constraint on the charge radius of dark matter is derived with the lowest excluded value of 1.9 × 1010^{−10} fm2^{2} for a dark matter mass of 40 giga electron volts per speed of light in a vaccum squared (GeV/c2^{2}), more stringent than that for neutrinos by four orders of magnitude. Constraints on the magnitudes of millicharge, magnetic dipole moment, electric dipole moment and anapole moment are also improved substantially from previous searches13,14^{13,14}, with corresponding tightest upper limits of 2.6 × 1011^{−11} e, 4.8 × 1010^{−10} Bohr magnetons, 1.2 × 1023^{−23} ecm and 1.6 × 1033^{−33} cm2^{2}, respectively, for a dark matter mass of 20–40 GeV/c2^{2}.
  • dark matter: mass
  • xenon: recoil
  • moment: dipole
  • magnetic moment: dipole
  • electric moment
  • moment: anapole
  • multipole
  • effective field theory
  • photon: velocity
  • charge radius