Direct detection constraints on dark photon dark matter

By H. An, M. Pospelov, J. Pradler, A. Ritz. 2014

280 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Dark matter detectors built primarily to probe elastic scattering of WIMPs on nuclei are also precise probes of light, weakly coupled, particles that may be absorbed by the detector material. In this paper, we derive constraints on the minimal model of dark matter comprised of long-lived vector states V (dark photons) in the 0.01–100 keV100 keV mass range. The absence of an ionization signal in direct detection experiments such as XENON10 and XENON100 places a very strong constraint on the dark photon mixing angle, down to O(10^(−15)), assuming that dark photons comprise the dominant fraction of dark matter. This sensitivity to dark photon dark matter exceeds the indirect bounds derived from stellar energy loss considerations over a significant fraction of the available mass range. We also revisit indirect constraints from V→3γ decay and show that limits from modifications to the cosmological ionization history are comparable to the updated limits from the diffuse γ-ray flux.

Subfields: Acoustics and Ultrasonics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb96f8b07196453e63e1b88f1809e3ce6daf58db

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Acoustics and Ultrasonics

1. Tongyan Lin
2. J. Redondo
3. S. Knapen

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. A. Ringwald
2. J. Redondo
3. P. Graham
4. Tongyan Lin
5. S. Rajendran
6. Igor G. Irastorza
7. J. Mardon
8. K. Zurek

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Tongyan Lin
2. J. Redondo
3. Igor G. Irastorza
4. K. Zurek
5. A. Ringwald
6. Maurizio Giannotti
7. P. Graham
8. R. Essig

Citations in the corpus

• Cool WISPs for stellar cooling excesses (2015, methodology): “Based on the discussion in [36], as dominant cooling channel we used the HP L-mode for RGB stars and the HP T-mode for HB stars.”
• Detection of sub-MeV dark matter with three-dimensional Dirac materials (2017, background): “Stellar emission constraints [101,105] are shown in shaded gray.”
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• Stellar cooling bounds on new light particles: plasma mixing effects (2016, background): “Another possible probe of B − L vectors or dark photons would be the direct detection of weakly-coupled states emitted from the Sun, in dark matter experiments on Earth [39, 40].”
• Direct detection of strongly interacting sub-GeV dark matter via electron recoils (2019, background): “One of the ways around this problem is to look for electron recoils and other signals induced by sub-GeV DM in various materials [4–33].”