An Improved Bound on Accelerated Light Dark Matter
Author:
Liangliang Su, Lei Wu, Bin Zhu
Keyword:
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology, High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph), High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)
journal:
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date:
2023-08-03 16:00:00
Abstract
Light (sub-GeV) dark matter is of growing interest in direct detection. Accelerated dark matter presents itself as a promising candidate capable of generating detectable nuclear recoil energy within the sub-GeV range. Due to the large kinetic energy, its interactions with the nucleus are predominantly governed by inelastic scattering, including quasi-elastic and deep inelastic scattering. In this work, we calculate the inelastic effects in the dark matter-Earth scattering mediated by a vector particle. Our analysis reveals that the impact of the inelastic scattering relies on the mediator mass and the kinetic energy spectrum of dark matter. The results exhibit a significant disparity, with the upper bounds of the exclusion limit for the spin-independent cross section between accelerated dark matter and nuclei via a heavy mediator differing by several tens of times when inelastic scattering is taken into account.