Supernova signals of light dark matter

Understand

Dark matter direct detection experiments have poor sensitivity to a galactic population of dark matter with mass below the GeV scale.

• However, such dark matter can be produced copiously in supernovae.
• Since this thermally-produced population is much hotter than the galactic dark matter, it can be observed with direct detection experiments.
• In this paper, we focus on a dark sector with fermion dark matter and a heavy dark photon as a specific example.