Fermionic sub-GeV Dark Matter from evaporating Primordial Black Holes at DarkSide-50

TL;DR

This paper searches for boosted fermionic sub-GeV dark matter produced by primordial black hole evaporation using the DarkSide-50 detector, setting new limits due to the absence of observed signals.

Contribution

It introduces a novel search for sub-GeV dark matter from PBH evaporation using ionization signals, providing complementary constraints to existing cosmological and direct detection methods.

Findings

No excess signals observed, leading to new limits on PBH-evaporated dark matter.

Constraints are complementary to cosmological and cosmic ray-boosted dark matter searches.

Demonstrates the viability of ionization-only detection for low-energy dark matter particles.

Abstract

We present a search for boosted dark matter from Primordial Black Holes (PBH) evaporation using the DarkSide-50 ionization-signal-only dataset corresponding to the experiment's ($12202\pm180$) ${\rm kg\: d}$ exposure. We focus on evaporation of PBHs with masses in the range [$10^{14},\,10^{16}$] g producing Dirac fermionic dark matter particles with sub-GeV kinetic energy. These relativistic particles, with energies up to hundreds of MeV, can generate detectable signals for masses below $\mathcal{O}(100)$ MeV. The absence of a signal enables setting complementary limits to those derived from cosmological observations and direct detection searches for cosmic ray-boosted dark matter.