Exploring ν signals in dark matter detectors

By R. Harnik, Joachim Kopp, P. Machado. 2012

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate standard and non-standard solar neutrino signals in direct dark matter detection experiments. It is well known that even without new physics, scattering of solar neutrinos on nuclei or electrons is an irreducible background for direct dark matter searches, once these experiments reach the ton scale. Here, we entertain the possibility that neutrino interactions are enhanced by new physics, such as new light force carriers (for instance a ``dark photon'') or neutrino magnetic moments. We consider models with only the three standard neutrino flavors, as well as scenarios with extra sterile neutrinos. We find that low-energy neutrino-electron and neutrino-nucleus scattering rates can be enhanced by several orders of magnitude, potentially enough to explain the event excesses observed in CoGeNT and CRESST. We also investigate temporal modulation in these neutrino signals, which can arise from geometric effects, oscillation physics, non-standard neutrino energy loss, and direction-dependent detection efficiencies. We emphasize that, in addition to providing potential explanations for existing signals, models featuring new physics in the neutrino sector can also be very relevant to future dark matter searches, where, on the one hand, they can be probed and constrained, but on the other hand, their signatures could also be confused with dark matter signals.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/01f1c913f3d16e61c60c53f71b6c612fe0e8828e

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Citations in the corpus

Refined bounds on MeV-scale thermal dark sectors from BBN and the CMB (2019, background): “Light dark matter particles and their potential mediators with the dark sector have been searched for at particle colliders [40–47], beam dump experiments [48–50], neutrino experiments [51–56], neutrino telescopes [57–59], as well as in direct [60–67] and indirect [68–70] dark matter detection exper”
Cosmology with a very light Lμ − Lτ gauge boson (2019, background): “Nonzero kinetic mixing introduces Z ′ mediated interactions between νµ,τ and charged fermions, which can distort the observed solar neutrino scattering rate at Borexino [24, 43, 50].”
Dark matter, millicharges, axion and scalar particles, gauge bosons, and other new physics with LDMX (2018, methodology): “Regions excluded by beam dumps [92, 110], neutrino scattering experiments [112, 113], BaBar [19] and SN1987A [151] are shaded in gray.”
Neutrino non-standard interactions: A status report (2019, methodology): “Neutrinos can produce a signal similar to a WIMP recoil event through the coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEνNS) process [125, 126].”
Stellar cooling bounds on new light particles: plasma mixing effects (2016, methodology): “[37, 38] also claim that there is a strong bound from the enhanced emission of SM neutrinos.”
Galactic Searches for Dark Matter (2012, background): “riments. It is also interesting to consider the possibility for extracting new physics from the coherent neutrino signal, for example as a probe of non-standard neutrino interactions (Pospelov, 2011; Harnik et al., 2012). Note that in their low threshold analysis, CDMSII has reduced the energy thres”