Direct detection of solar chameleons with electron recoil data from XENONnT

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of XENONnT data to detect solar chameleons, a dark energy candidate, by analyzing electron recoil signals dominated by Primakoff production, setting new constraints on their coupling parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a revised model for solar chameleon detection via electron recoils, emphasizing Primakoff production and deriving new bounds on their effective coupling from XENONnT data.

Findings

Primakoff production dominates electron recoil signals.

XENONnT data constrains the effective coupling to log10(β_eff) < -6.9.

Constraints apply broadly to inverse power-law chameleons.

Abstract

We reassess prospects for direct detection of solar chameleons, in light of recent progress in modeling their production, and the availability of new XENONnT data. We show that the contribution from Primakoff production in the electric fields of electrons and ions dominates the electron recoil event rate, which is enhanced compared to earlier estimates based on magnetic conversion in the tachocline alone. We argue that the signal is governed by the effective coupling $\beta_{\text{eff}} \equiv \beta_{\gamma}M_e^{-4}$, which encodes the combined effects of production and detection, where $\beta_{\gamma}$ and $M_e$ are the chameleon-photon (conformal) coupling and chameleon-electron disformal coupling scale, respectively. Setting the height of the chameleon potential to the dark energy (DE) scale $\Lambda \simeq 2.4\,{\text{meV}}$, we show that XENONnT electron recoil data set the upper limit $\log_{10}\beta_{\text{eff}}<-6.9$. This limit is independent of the conformal matter coupling $\beta_m$ and index $n$, and applies to the whole class of inverse power-law chameleons, well beyond the $n=1$ case usually studied. We comment on how future multi-target experiments and lower-threshold analyses could distinguish solar chameleons from other light (pseudo)scalar particles such as axions. Our work demonstrates that existing dark matter direct detection experiments can probe regions of parameter space relevant to screened DE models, providing complementary tests to astrophysical and fifth-force searches at no additional experimental cost.