Prospects for Light Dark Matter Searches at Large-Volume Neutrino Detectors
We propose a new approach to search for light dark matter (DM), with keV-GeV mass, via inelastic nucleus scattering at large-volume neutrino detectors such as Borexino, DUNE, Super-K, Hyper-K, and JUNO. The approach uses inelastic nuclear scattering of cosmic-ray boosted DM, enabling a low-background search for DM in these experiments. Large neutrino detectors, with higher thresholds than dark matter detectors, can be used, since the nuclear deexcitation lines are O(10) MeV. Using a hadrophilic dark-gauge-boson-portal model as a benchmark, we show that the nuclear inelastic channels generally provide better sensitivity than the elastic scattering for a large region of light DM parameter space.
Authors
- Doojin Kim (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4186-4265)
- Jayden L. Newstead (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8704-3550)
- I. Ali (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-1969-9444)
- Bhaskar Dutta (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8885)
- Jong-Chul Park (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1276-875X)
- Wei‐Chih Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6294-4272)
Institutions
- The University of Melbourne (AU)
- University of South Dakota (US)
- Chungnam National University (KR)
- Mitchell Institute (US)
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics (AU)
- Texas A&M University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Physical Review Letters
- Published
- 2024-10-16
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.133.161801
- Citations
- 11
- Primary Topic
- Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 7.26
Funders
- U.S. Department of Energy
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- Ministry of Science and ICT, South Korea
- Australian Research Council