New constraints and prospects for sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon
By R. Essig, T. Volansky, T. Yu. 2017
350 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study in detail sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon, including the expected electron recoil spectra and annual modulation spectra. We derive improved constraints using low-energy XENON10 and XENON100 ionization-only data. For XENON10, in addition to including electron-recoil data corresponding to about $1-3$ electrons, we include for the first time events with $\gtrsim 4$ electrons. Assuming the scattering is momentum independent, this strengthens a previous cross-section bound by almost an order of magnitude for dark matter masses above 50 MeV. The available XENON100 data corresponds to events with $\gtrsim 4$ electrons, and leads to a constraint that is comparable to the XENON10 bound above 50 MeV. We demonstrate that a search for an annual modulation signal in upcoming xenon experiments (XENON1T, XENONnT, LZ) could substantially improve the above bounds even in the presence of large backgrounds. We also emphasize that in simple benchmark models of sub-GeV dark matter, the dark matter-electron scattering rate can be as high as one event every ten (two) seconds in the XENON1T (XENONnT or LZ) experiments, without being in conflict with any other known experimental bounds. While there are several sources of backgrounds that can produce single- or few-electron events, a large event rate can be consistent with a dark matter signal and should not be simply written off as purely a detector curiosity. This fact motivates a detailed analysis of the ionization-only ("S2-only") data, taking into account the expected annual modulation spectrum of the signal rate, as well as the DM-induced electron-recoil spectra, which are another powerful discriminant between signal and background.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9788d0d81b435604d06bc4a93709dcf13ddc0a19
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Citations in the corpus
- Light dark matter: Models and constraints (2017, background): “Current bounds from Xenon10 and Xenon100 are also shown [42,110].”
- 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”
- Direct detection of strongly interacting sub-GeV dark matter via electron recoils (2019, methodology): “For atomic targets such as liquid xenon or argon, the ionization rate of an electron to final energy Ee in a detector of NT target atoms is given by [4, 5, 25]”
- Dark matter models and direct detection (2019, methodology): “Experimental sensitivity to events with a single or a few ionization electrons has been demonstrated with XENON10, XENON100 [168] and more recently DarkSide [169], thus allowing for a novel way to probe light DM scattering off of electrons with an existing experimental setup [170].”
- Physics beyond colliders at CERN: beyond the Standard Model working group report (2019, methodology): “A re-analysis of electron-scattering data from direct detection experiments has led to constraints in the sub-GeV DM region [211, 212]”
- Dark matter, millicharges, axion and scalar particles, gauge bosons, and other new physics with LDMX (2018, methodology): “The shaded gray regions are excluded from previous experiments, such as the BaBar monophoton analysis [96], beam dump search at E137 [16, 86], and the XENON10 direct detection experiment [32, 97–99].”