• Open Access

Accelerating Earth-bound dark matter

David McKeen, Marianne Moore, David E. Morrissey, Maxim Pospelov, and Harikrishnan Ramani
Phys. Rev. D 106, 035011 – Published 10 August 2022

Abstract

A fraction of the dark matter may consist of a particle species that interacts much more strongly with the Standard Model than a typical weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) of similar mass. Such a strongly interacting dark matter component could have avoided detection in searches for WIMP-like dark matter through its interactions with the material in the atmosphere and the Earth that slow it down significantly before reaching detectors underground. These same interactions can also enhance the density of a strongly interacting dark matter species near the Earth’s surface to well above the local galactic dark matter density. In this work, we propose two new methods of detecting strongly interacting dark matter based on accelerating the enhanced population expected in the Earth through scattering. The first approach is to use underground nuclear accelerator beams to upscatter the ambient dark matter population into a WIMP-style detector located downstream. In the second technique, dark matter is upscattered with an intense thermal source and detected with a low-threshold dark matter detector. We also discuss potential candidates for strongly interacting dark matter, and we show that the scenario can be naturally realized with a hidden fermion coupled to a sub-GeV dark photon.

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  • Received 2 March 2022
  • Accepted 21 July 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.035011

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Particles & Fields

Authors & Affiliations

David McKeen1,*, Marianne Moore1,2,3,†, David E. Morrissey1,‡, Maxim Pospelov4,5,§, and Harikrishnan Ramani6,∥

  • 1TRIUMF, 4004 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver, British ColumbiaV6T 2A3, Canada
  • 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z1, Canada
  • 3Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
  • 4School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA
  • 5William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA
  • 6Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA

  • *mckeen@triumf.ca
  • mamoore@mit.edu
  • dmorri@triumf.ca
  • §pospelov@umn.edu
  • hramani@stanford.edu

Article Text

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Issue

Vol. 106, Iss. 3 — 1 August 2022

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