Accelerated Light Dark Matter-Earth Inelastic Scattering in Direct Detection

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of inelastic dark matter-nucleus scattering processes on underground detection sensitivity, revealing that these processes can significantly alter existing limits, especially for accelerated dark matter scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces calculations of inelastic scattering contributions to the Earth-stopping effect, highlighting their importance in dark matter detection analyses.

Findings

Inelastic scattering can change upper limits on dark matter-nucleus cross-section by an order of magnitude.

Elastic-only models underestimate the Earth-stopping effect in dark matter detection.

Inelastic processes are crucial for accurate interpretation of atmospheric dark matter data.

Abstract

The Earth-stopping effect plays a crucial role in the direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter. Besides the elastic scattering process, the quasi-elastic and deep inelastic scatterings between dark matter and nucleus that are usually neglected can dominate the interaction, especially in the accelerated dark matter scenarios, which may affect the dark matter detection sensitivity significantly for the underground experiments. We calculate such inelastic scattering contributions in the Earth-stopping effect and illustrate the essence of our argument with the atmospheric dark matter. With the available data, we find that the resulting upper limits on the atmospheric dark matter-nucleus scattering cross-section can differ from those only considering the elastic scattering process by one order of magnitude.