Cosmic Ray Boosted Sub-GeV Gravitationally Interacting Dark Matter in Direct Detection

TL;DR

This paper explores how high-energy cosmic rays can boost light dark matter particles, enabling their detection via gravitational interactions in direct detection experiments, and derives exclusion limits from Xenon1T data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to detect sub-GeV dark matter through cosmic ray boosting and establishes current experimental constraints on such models.

Findings

Significant parameter space for cosmic ray boosted dark matter is excluded by Xenon1T.

Cosmic ray boosting enhances the detectability of light dark matter in direct detection experiments.

Current data can constrain dark matter models communicating only through gravity.

Abstract

Detections of non-gravitational interactions of massive dark matter (DM) with visible sector so far have given null results. The DM may communicate with the ordinary matter only through gravitational interaction. Besides, the majority of traditional direct detections have poor sensitivities for light DM because of the small recoil energy. Thanks to the high energy cosmic rays (CRs), the light DM can be boosted by scattering with CRs and thus may be detected in the ongoing experiments. In this work, we derive the exclusion limits on the cosmic ray boosted sub-GeV DM with gravitational mediator from the Xenon1T data. It turns out that a sizable region of such a cosmic ray boosted DM can be excluded by the current data.