Optimizing Energetic Light Dark Matter Searches in Dark Matter and Neutrino Experiments

Understand

Neutrino and dark matter experiments with large-volume ($\gtrsim 1$ ton) detectors can provide excellent sensitivity to signals induced by energetic light dark matter coming from the present universe.

• Taking boosted dark matter as a concrete example of energetic light dark matter, we scrutinize two representative search channels, electron scattering and proton scattering including deep inelastic scattering processes, in the context of elastic and inelastic boosted dark matter, in a completely detector-independent manner.
• In this work, a dark gauge boson is adopted as the particle to mediate the interactions between the Standard Model particles and boosted dark matter.
• We find that the signal sensitivity of the two channels highly depends on the (mass-)parameter region to probe, so search strategies and channels should be designed sensibly especially at the earlier stage of experiments.