Boosted dark matter from diffuse supernova neutrinos

Understand

The XENON collaboration recently reported an excess of electron recoil events in the low energy region with a significance of around $3.3\sigma$.

• An explanation of this excess in terms of thermal dark matter seems challenging.
• We propose a scenario where dark matter in the Milky Way halo gets boosted as a result of scattering with the diffuse supernova neutrino background.
• This interaction can accelerate the dark-matter to semi-relativistic velocities, and this flux, in turn, can scatter with the electrons in the detector, thereby providing a much better fit to the data.