Work

Accelerated-light-dark-matter–Earth inelastic scattering in direct detection

Year: 2023

Type: article

Abstract: The Earth-stopping effect plays a crucial role in the direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter. Besides the elastic scattering process, the quasielastic and deep inelastic scatterings between dark matter and nucleus that are usually neglected can dominate the interaction, especially in the accelerated dark matter scenarios, which may affect the dark matter detection sensitivity significantly for the underground experiments. We calculate such inelastic scattering contributions in the Earth-stopping effect and illustrate the essence of our argument with the atmospheric dark matter. With the available data, we find that the resulting upper limits on the atmospheric dark matter-nucleus scattering cross section can differ from those only considering the elastic scattering process by about 1 order of magnitude.

Source: Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

DOI: 10.1103/physrevd.108.035004

Authors: Liangliang Su, Lei Wu, Ning Zhou, Bin Zhu

Institutions: Nanjing Normal University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, Yantai University

Language: English

Topic: Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena

Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Field: Physics and Astronomy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China

Awards: G1543536403, G1933317495, G4535974609