Direct Detection of the Millicharged Background
Autor: | Iles, Ella, Heeba, Saniya, Schutz, Katelin |
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Rok vydání: | 2024 |
Předmět: | |
Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
Popis: | We show that dark matter direct detection experiments are sensitive to the existence of particles with a small effective charge (for instance, via couplings to a kinetically mixed, low-mass dark photon). Our forecasts do not depend on these particles comprising a significant fraction of the dark matter. Rather, these experiments are sensitive to the irreducible abundance produced in the early universe through the freeze-in mechanism. We find that ongoing and proposed direct detection experiments will have world-leading sensitivity to effective charges $Q\sim 10^{-12}$ across nine orders of magnitude in mass, corresponding to a dark matter sub-fraction as low as $\sim 10^{-3}$. Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures + 1 secret doodle |
Databáze: | arXiv |
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