Self-Destructing Dark Matter
- Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY (United States)
- Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States); Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)
We present Self-Destructing Dark Matter (SDDM), a new class of dark matter models which are detectable in large neutrino detectors. In this class of models, a component of dark matter can transition from a long-lived state to a short-lived one by scattering off of a nucleus or an electron in the Earth. The short-lived state then decays to Standard Model particles, generating a dark matter signal with a visible energy of order the dark matter mass rather than just its recoil. This leads to striking signals in large detectors with high energy thresholds. We present a few examples of models which exhibit self destruction, all inspired by bound state dynamics in the Standard Model. The models under consideration exhibit a rich phenomenology, possibly featuring events with one, two, or even three lepton pairs, each with a fixed invariant mass and a fixed energy, as well as non-trivial directional distributions. This motivates dedicated searches for dark matter in large underground detectors such as Super-K, Borexino, SNO+, and DUNE.
- Research Organization:
- Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-07CH11359
- OSTI ID:
- 1423228
- Report Number(s):
- arXiv:1712.00455; FERMILAB-PUB-17-505-T; NUHEP-TH-17-07; 1640570
- Journal Information:
- Journal of High Energy Physics (Online), Vol. 2019, Issue 7; ISSN 1029-8479
- Publisher:
- Springer BerlinCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Web of Science
| Explaining the ANITA Anomaly with Inelastic Boosted Dark Matter | text | January 2019 |
| Signatures of Mirror Stars | text | January 2019 |
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