Direct Detection Portals for Self-interacting Dark Matter

By M. Kaplinghat, S. Tulin, Hai-Bo Yu. 2013

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Dark matter self-interactions can affect the small scale structure of the Universe, reducing the central densities of dwarfs and low surface brightness galaxies in accord with observations. From a particle physics point of view, this points toward the existence of a 1-100 MeV particle in the dark sector that mediates self-interactions. Since mediator particles will generically couple to the Standard Model, direct detection experiments provide sensitive probes of self-interacting dark matter. We consider three minimal mechanisms for coupling the dark and visible sectors: photon kinetic mixing, Z boson mass mixing, and the Higgs portal. Self-interacting dark matter motivates a new benchmark paradigm for direct detection via momentum-dependent interactions, and ton-scale experiments will cover astrophysically motivated parameter regimes that are unconstrained by current limits. Direct detection is a complementary avenue to constrain velocity-dependent self-interactions that evade astrophysical bounds from larger scales, such as those from the bullet cluster. © 2014 American Physical Society.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/749f5aab4b76619e20415bad84237f74d091d8cf

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Citations in the corpus

A taste of dark matter: flavour constraints on pseudoscalar mediators (2014, unknown): “Although DM self-interactions via pseudoscalar exchange are significantly more involved than for scalar exchange, the latter are strongly constrained when imposing relic density constraints and BBN constraints, because the predicted event rates in direct detection experiments are typically too large”
DarkSUSY 6: an advanced tool to compute dark matter properties numerically (2018, background): “We caution, however, that such decay channels are strongly constrained from direct detection experiments (for the case of scalar mediators [184]) or cosmology (for the case of vector mediators [185]).”
Core formation in dwarf haloes with self-interacting dark matter: no fine-tuning necessary (2014, background): “In most particle-physics based models for SIDM, the scattering interactions have a velocity dependence (e.g., Loeb & Weiner, 2011; Tulin et al., 2013a; Kaplinghat et al., 2014; Boddy et al., 2014b,a).”
A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, background): “However, without such a coupling, and in the absence of additional light states there will be a population of mediator particles that dominates the DM mass budget over self-interacting χ particles [155].”
Direct detection of strongly interacting sub-GeV dark matter via electron recoils (2019, background): “The mixing between the U(1)em and U(1)D gauge bosons generates an interaction between the dark photon and charged fermions of the SM [82].”