Direct detection and solar capture of dark matter with momentum and velocity dependent elastic scattering

Understand

We explore the momentum and velocity dependent elastic scattering between the dark matter (DM) particles and the nuclei in detectors and the Sun.

• In terms of the non-relativistic effective theory, we phenomenologically discuss ten kinds of momentum and velocity dependent DM-nucleus interactions and recalculate the corresponding upper limits on the spin-independent DM-nucleon scattering cross section from the current direct detection experiments.
• The DM solar capture rate is calculated for each interaction.
• Our numerical results show that the momentum and velocity dependent cases can give larger solar capture rate than the usual contact interaction case for almost the whole parameter space.