Searching for Dark Absorption with Direct Detection Experiments

Understand

We consider the absorption by bound electrons of dark matter in the form of dark photons and axion-like particles, as well as of dark photons from the Sun, in current and next-generation direct detection experiments.

• Experiments sensitive to electron recoils can detect such particles with masses between a few eV to more than 10 keV.
• For dark photon dark matter, we update a previous bound based on XENON10 data and derive new bounds based on data from XENON100 and CDMSlite.
• We find these experiments to disfavor previously allowed parameter space.