Dark Matter Internal Pair Production -- A Novel Direct Detection Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new detection method for dark matter called dark matter internal pair production (DIPP), which involves dark matter inducing lepton-antilepton pairs in experiments, offering a promising way to identify dark matter signals.

Contribution

The paper proposes DIPP as a novel detection mechanism for dark matter at beam dump facilities, expanding the experimental search strategies for various dark matter models.

Findings

DIPP can effectively distinguish dark matter signals from backgrounds.

DIPP is promising for probing dark matter coupled to dark photons, quarks, and muons.

Experiments like DUNE ND and DarkQuest can utilize DIPP for dark matter detection.

Abstract

We propose a novel mechanism, dark matter internal pair production (DIPP), to detect dark matter candidates at beam dump facilities. When energetic dark matter scatters in a material, it can create a lepton-antilepton pair by exchanging a virtual photon with the nucleus, similar to the neutrino trident process. We demonstrate this process for dark matter coupled to dark photons in experiments such as DarkQuest, SBND, and DUNE ND experiments. Since the pair-produced lepton-antilepton pair carries a large fraction of the center-of-mass energy and also has similar energy profiles, they can be clearly distinguished from backgrounds. We utilize the above features to show that DIPP is effective in probing various dark matter models, especially at DUNE ND and DarkQuest, by looking for electron-positron and muon-antimuon signatures. We also consider a scenario with dark sector couplings to quarks and muons only to show that DIPP can probe a wide range of dark matter models with various final states.