Millicharged atomic dark matter

By J. Cline, Zuowei Liu, W. Xue. 2012

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a simplified version of the atomic dark matter scenario, in which charged dark constituents are bound into atoms analogous to hydrogen by a massless hidden sector U(1) gauge interaction. Previous studies have assumed that interactions between the dark sector and the standard model are mediated by a second, massive ${Z}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ gauge boson, but here we consider the case where only a massless ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ kinetically mixes with the standard model hypercharge and thereby mediates direct detection. This is, therefore, the simplest atomic dark matter model that has direct interactions with the standard model, arising from the small electric charge for the dark constituents induced by the kinetic mixing. We map out the parameter space that is consistent with cosmological constraints and direct searches, assuming that some unspecified mechanism creates the asymmetry that gives the right abundance, since the dark matter cannot be a thermal relic in this scenario. In the special case where the dark electron and proton are degenerate in mass, inelastic hyperfine transitions can explain the CoGeNT excess events. In the more general case, elastic transitions dominate and can be close to current direct-detection limits over a wide range of masses.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b8f76e8e8bf601c022ab35005f3b594390a651db

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Citations in the corpus

Dark nuclei. I. Cosmology and indirect detection (2014, background): “Popular examples include dark sectors, or sub-sectors, with dark atomic behavior [1–12] or strongly-coupled dark sectors leading to composite DM candidates [13–35], which are the focus of this work.”
Double-Disk Dark Matter (2013, background): “We note that other authors have proposed interesting scenarios for dark matter involving long range forces and bound states: the older idea of mirror matter [8–14], recent work on dark matter charged under a hidden U(1) [15–17], and more recent work on dark atoms [7, 18–20].”
Modulation Effects in Dark Matter-Electron Scattering Experiments (2015, background): “A daily modulation induced by scattering in the Earth’s interior has been discussed before in the context of nuclear recoils by [54–61].”
The Dark Photon (2020, unknown): “…et al., 2009; Baldi, 2013; Boddy et al., 2014; Buckley and Fox, 2010; Buen-Abad et al., 2015; Carlson et al., 1992; Chu and Dasgupta, 2014; Cline et al., 2014, 2012; Cyr-Racine and Sigurdson, 2013; Feng et al., 2009, 2008; Foot, 2004; Gabrielli and Raidal, 2014; Goldberg and Hall, 1986;…”