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No room to hide: implications of cosmic-ray upscattering for GeV-scale dark matter

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arxiv 2209.03360 v2 pith:QL7DC4Y5 submitted 2022-09-07 hep-ph astro-ph.CO

classification hep-phastro-ph.CO
keywords darkmatterscatteringupscatteringcosmic-raylightnuclearparticles
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

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The irreducible upscattering of cold dark matter by cosmic rays opens up the intriguing possibility of detecting even light dark matter in conventional direct detection experiments or underground neutrino detectors. The mechanism also significantly enhances sensitivity to models with very large nuclear scattering rates, where the atmosphere and rock overburden efficiently stop standard non-relativistic dark matter particles before they could reach the detector. In this article, we demonstrate that cosmic-ray upscattering essentially closes the window for strongly interacting dark matter in the (sub-)GeV mass range. Arriving at this conclusion crucially requires a detailed treatment of both nuclear form factors and inelastic dark matter-nucleus scattering, as well as including the full momentum-transfer dependence of scattering amplitudes. We illustrate the latter point by considering three generic situations where such a momentum-dependence is particularly relevant, namely for interactions dominated by the exchange of light vector or scalar mediators, respectively, and for dark matter particles of finite size. As a final concrete example, we apply our analysis to a putative hexaquark state, which has been suggested as a viable baryonic dark matter candidate. Once again, we find that the updated constraints derived in this work close a significant part of otherwise unconstrained parameter space.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Primordial black holes as cosmic accelerators of light dark matter: Novel direct detection constraints

    hep-ph 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    Primordial black hole evaporation generates light fermionic dark matter capable of producing electron recoils in XENONnT, LZ, and PandaX-4T, enabling new constraints on DM-electron interactions after including Earth a...

  2. Inelastic Scattering Effects on Attenuation of Boosted Dark Matter

    hep-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Resonant excitation of nucleons into Δ(1232) during Earth passage is a non-negligible attenuation channel for boosted dark matter at E_χ ≈ 1–2 GeV, lowering the PandaX-4T upper bound on σ̄_n in the heavy-mediator regime.

  3. Detecting light dark matter with prompt-delayed events in neutrino experiments

    hep-ph 2025-04 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    The prompt-delayed knockout-neutron channel in KamLAND yields a sub-GeV dark matter-nucleon cross-section limit roughly one order of magnitude stronger than elastic nuclear recoil limits.

  4. Boosted Dark Matter Driven by Cosmic Rays and Diffuse Supernova Neutrinos

    hep-ph 2024-11 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Combining cosmic-ray and supernova-neutrino boosts yields the strongest constraints to date on sub-GeV dark matter scattering with electrons, nucleons, and neutrinos.

  5. A congruous approach with realistic cross section towards limiting sub-GeV dark matter from LUX-ZEPLIN

    hep-ph 2025-09 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Using LZ nuclear recoil data, the authors derive 90% CL exclusion limits on cosmic-ray-boosted sub-GeV dark matter for two U(1)' mediator models, with energy-dependent cross sections improving the lower reach versus c...

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