Light Dark Matter from Inelastic Cosmic Ray Collisions

Autor:	Alvey, James, Campos, Miguel, Fairbairn, Malcolm, You, Tevong
Rok vydání:	2019
Předmět:	High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Zdroj:	Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 261802 (2019)
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
DOI:	10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.261802
Popis:	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. Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, v2 published in PRL
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/1905.05776 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv