Abstract
Inelastic dark matter with moderate splittings, \( \mathcal{O} \)(few to 150) keV, can upscatter to an excited state in the Earth, with the excited state subsequently decaying, leaving a distinctive monoenergetic photon signal in large underground detectors. The photon signal can exhibit sidereal-daily modulation, providing excellent separation from backgrounds. Using a detailed numerical simulation, we examine this process as a search strategy for magnetic inelastic dark matter with the dark matter mass near the weak scale, where the upscatter to the excited state and decay proceed through the same magnetic dipole transition operator. At lower inelastic splittings, the scattering is dominated by moderate mass elements in the Earth with high spin, especially 27Al, while at larger splittings, 56Fe becomes the dominant target. We show that the proposed large volume gaseous detector CYGNUS will have excellent sensitivity to this signal. Xenon detectors also provide excellent sensitivity through the inelastic nuclear recoil signal, and if a future signal is seen, we show that the synergy among both types of detection can provide strong evidence for magnetic inelastic dark matter. In the course we have calculated nuclear response functions for elements relevant for scattering in the Earth, which are publicly available on GitHub.
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Acknowledgments
We thank W. Haxton for help with BIGSTICK, D. Snowden-Ifft for discussions of DRIFT and S. Vahsen for discussions of CYGNUS. The work of JE was supported by the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI), MEXT, Japan and by the JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 21H05451 and 21K20366, as well as by the Swedish Research Council (VR) under grants 2018-03641 and 2019-02337. The work of PJF was supported by the DoE under contract number DE-SC0007859 and Fermilab, operated by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under contract number DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the United States Department of Energy. The work of GDK was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under Grant Number DE-SC0011640.
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Eby, J., Fox, P.J. & Kribs, G.D. Earth-catalyzed detection of magnetic inelastic dark matter with photons in large underground detectors. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 165 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2024)165
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2024)165