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Title: On the Direct Detection of Dark Matter Annihilation

Journal Article · · Physical Review Letters
 [1];  [2];  [2]
  1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  2. Univ. of Southern Denmark, Odense (Denmark). CP3-Origins and the Danish Inst. for Advanced Study
+ Show Author Affiliations

We investigate the direct detection phenomenology of a class of dark matter (DM) models in which DM does not directly interact with nuclei, but rather, the products of its annihilation do. When these annihilation products are very light compared to the DM mass, the scattering in direct detection experiments is controlled by relativistic kinematics. This results in a distinctive recoil spectrum, a nonstandard and/or even absent annual modulation, and the ability to probe DM masses as low as a ~ 10 MeV. Here, we use current LUX data to show that experimental sensitivity to thermal relic annihilation cross sections has already been reached in a class of models. Moreover, the compatibility of dark matter direct detection experiments can be compared directly in E min space without making assumptions about DM astrophysics, mass, or scattering form factors. Lastly, when DM has direct couplings to nuclei, the limit from annihilation to relativistic particlesin the Sun can be stronger than that of conventional nonrelativistic direct detection by more than 3 orders of magnitude for masses in a 2–7 GeV window.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-06NA25396
OSTI ID:
1454985
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1184441
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-15-20058; TRN: US1901183
Journal Information:
Physical Review Letters, Vol. 114, Issue 23; ISSN 0031-9007
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 31 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Dark Matter or Neutrino recoil? Interpretation of Recent Experimental Results text January 2013
Direct and indirect detection of dissipative dark matter text January 2013
Taking Halo-Independent Dark Matter Methods Out of the Bin text January 2014
New weakly-coupled forces hidden in low-energy QCD text January 2014
Direct Detection of Light "Ge-phobic" Exothermic Dark Matter text January 2014
A systematic halo-independent analysis of direct detection data within the framework of Inelastic Dark Matter text January 2014
Fitting the annual modulation in DAMA with neutrons from muons and neutrinos text January 2014
Quantifying (dis)agreement between direct detection experiments in a halo-independent way text January 2014
What is the probability that direct detection experiments have observed Dark Matter? text January 2014
Boosted dark matter signals uplifted with self-interaction text January 2014
(In)Direct Detection of Boosted Dark Matter text January 2015
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Cited By (6)

DAMA confronts null searches in the effective theory of dark matter-nucleon interactions journal May 2016
New constraints and discovery potential of sub-GeV dark matter with xenon detectors journal August 2017
Highlight Talk from Super-Kamiokande journal January 2019
DAMA confronts null searches in the effective theory of dark matter-nucleon interactions text January 2016
New constraints and discovery potential of sub-GeV dark matter with xenon detectors text January 2017
Monochromatic dark neutrinos and boosted dark matter in noble liquid direct detection text January 2018

Figures / Tables (3)

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FIG. 2(p. 5)figure FIG. 2
FIG. 3(p. 6)figure FIG. 3

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79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS