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Attenuation of Cosmic-Ray Up-Scattered Dark Matter
by Helena Kolesova
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Submission summary
| Authors (as registered SciPost users): | Helena Kolesova |
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| Preprint Link: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14600v1 (pdf) |
| Date submitted: | 2022-09-30 11:34 |
| Submitted by: | Kolesova, Helena |
| Submitted to: | SciPost Physics Proceedings |
| Proceedings issue: | 14th International Conference on Identification of Dark Matter (IDM2022) |
| Ontological classification | |
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| Academic field: | Physics |
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Abstract
GeV-scale dark matter particles with strong coupling to baryons evade the standard direct detection limits as they are efficiently stopped in the overburden and, consequently, are not able to reach the underground detectors. On the other hand, it has been shown that it is possible to probe this parameter space taking into account the flux of dark matter particles boosted by interactions with cosmic rays. We revisit these bounds paying particular attention to interactions of the relativistic dark matter particles in the Earth's crust. The effects of nuclear form factors, inelastic scattering and extra dependence of the cross section on transferred momentum (e.g., due to presence of light mediators) are studied and are found to be crucial for answering the question as to whether the window for GeV-scale strongly interacting dark matter is closed or not.
Current status:
Reports on this Submission
Report #1 by Anonymous (Referee 1) on 2022-10-20 (Invited Report)
- Cite as: Anonymous, Report on arXiv:2209.14600v1, delivered 2022-10-20, doi: 10.21468/SciPost.Report.5940
Strengths
1. The topic of this work, cosmic ray up-scattering, has been suggested as a very useful mechanism to boost astrophysical dark matter that strongly couples with e/N, leading to detectable recoil events in large-volume detectors.
2. This manuscript carefully takes into account the effects of inelastic scattering with the Earth, among other effects, significantly improving the precision of the relevant DM direct detection bounds.
Weaknesses
The crucial point is the inclusion of inelastic scattering with the Earth, which seems to rely on the results of neutrino-nucleus cross sections. But neutrino is supposed to always relativistic, while here dark matter is only semi-relativistic, so it would be nice if the author can provide more comments on the relevant uncertainties here.
Report
This manuscript summaries their very useful improvements on the treatment of semi-relativistic dark matter scattering with the Earth, by including several subtle effects. It is quite clear, and meets the criteria of SciPost Physics Proceedings.
And it would be even better if the author can further improve it by making the requested changes below.
Requested changes
Although technical details should not be required for a proceeding, given the importance here, I suggest the author add a few sentences in Sec. 2.2, to comment on the uncertainties in their treatment on inelastic scattering.
PS, the author may shorten the first paragraph of Introduction a little, if the manuscript becomes too long after the changes.
Author: Helena Kolesova on 2022-11-15 [id 3018]
(in reply to Report 1 on 2022-10-20)Hereby, I would like to thank the referee for useful remarks. I changed the text accordingly (see my recent resubmission), however, I would also like to give here a self-contained answer to the referee's question.
The relevance of different inelastic processes for scattering with nuclei is mainly determined by the momentum transferred in the interaction. Maximum transferred momentum, in turn, is given by the kinetic energy of the scattering particle. Although the DM particles under consideration may only be semi-relativistic, their kinetic energies are comparable to kinetic energies for neutrinos that scatter inelastically from nuclei. Consequently, we believe that qualitatively, similar inelastic processes can be expected for DM. Of course, the exact value of the DM-nucleus inelastic cross section depends on the nature of the DM-nucleon interactions which may differ from the neutrino ones. We tried to capture this by rescaling the cross section by the ratio of DM-nucleon and neutrino-nucleon cross sections, but of course, a certain level of uncertainty is introduced in this way. We checked, however, that this uncertainty does not have a large impact on our final conclusions.