Searching for Boosted Dark Matter mediated by a new Gauge Boson

TL;DR

This paper explores the detection of boosted sub-GeV dark matter produced by cosmic ray interactions, mediated by a new gauge boson, and assesses its detectability in current experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a model of boosted dark matter mediated by a $U(1)_D$ gauge boson and analyzes its potential detection in various experimental setups.

Findings

Boosted dark matter can produce detectable recoil signals in underground detectors.

Existing experiments can constrain the parameter space of the model.

Collider and beam-dump experiments provide complementary search avenues.

Abstract

We study the possibility to directly detect the boosted dark matter generated from the scatterings with high energetic cosmic particles such as protons and electrons. As a concrete example, we consider the sub-GeV dark matter mediated by a $U(1)_D$ gauge boson which has mixing with $U(1)_Y$ gauge boson in the standard model. The enhanced kinetic energy of the light dark matter from the collision with the cosmic rays can recoil the target nucleus and electron in the underground direct detection experiments transferring enough energy to them to be detectable. We show the impact of BDM with existing direct detection experiments as well as collider and beam-dump experiments.