Cosmic Ray Boosted Sub-GeV Gravitationally Interacting Dark Matter in Direct Detection

Understand

Detections of non-gravitational interactions of massive dark matter (DM) with visible sector so far have given null results.

• The DM may communicate with the ordinary matter only through gravitational interaction.
• Besides, the majority of traditional direct detections have poor sensitivities for light DM because of the small recoil energy.
• Thanks to the high energy cosmic rays (CRs), the light DM can be boosted by scattering with CRs and thus may be detected in the ongoing experiments.