Accelerating Earth-Bound Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper proposes novel methods to detect strongly interacting dark matter by accelerating its population near Earth through scattering with underground beams or thermal sources, potentially revealing new dark matter candidates.

Contribution

It introduces two innovative detection techniques for strongly interacting dark matter based on upscattering methods, expanding current detection strategies.

Findings

Enhanced dark matter density near Earth's surface due to interactions.

Feasible detection of strongly interacting dark matter using underground accelerators.

Potential realization with hidden fermion and sub-GeV dark photon candidates.

Abstract

A fraction of the dark matter may consist of a particle species that interacts much more strongly with the Standard Model than a typical weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) of similar mass. Such a strongly interacting dark matter component could have avoided detection in searches for WIMP-like dark matter through its interactions with the material in the atmosphere and the Earth that slow it down significantly before reaching detectors underground. These same interactions can also enhance the density of a strongly interacting dark matter species near the Earth's surface to well above the local galactic dark matter density. In this work we propose two new methods of detecting strongly interacting dark matter based on accelerating the enhanced population expected in the Earth through scattering. The first approach is to use underground nuclear accelerator beams to upscatter the ambient dark matter population into a WIMP-style detector located downstream. In the second technique, dark matter is upscattered with an intense thermal source and detected with a low-threshold dark matter detector. We also discuss potential candidates for strongly interacting dark matter and we show that the scenario can be naturally realized with a hidden fermion coupled to a sub-GeV dark photon.