Abstract

If dark matter has mass lower than around 1 GeV, it will not impart enough energy to cause detectable nuclear recoils in many direct-detection experiments. However, if dark matter is upscattered to high energy by collisions with cosmic rays, it may be detectable in both direct-detection experiments and neutrino experiments. We report the results of a dedicated search for boosted dark matter upscattered by cosmic rays, using ∼14.6 solar days of data from the PROSPECT reactor antineutrino experiment. We show that such a flux of upscattered dark matter would display characteristic diurnal sidereal modulation, and use this to set new experimental constraints on sub-GeV dark matter exhibiting large interaction cross sections.1 MoreReceived 3 May 2021Accepted 22 June 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.012009Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasCosmic rays & astroparticlesDark matterParticle dark matterTechniquesDark matter detectorsNeutrino detectorsParticles & Fields

Highlights

  • Despite strong evidence for dark matter’s (DM) existence, its particle nature remains unknown, and its identification is one of the most pressing problems in particle physics and astrophysics [1,2,3]

  • If the DM-nucleon scattering cross section σχN is nonzero, cosmic rays (CRs) nuclei have a chance to collide with DM particles as they propagate in the galaxy

  • After applying analysis cuts designed to select isolated proton recoil signatures within 440 kg of target liquid scintillator, we have identified 37522 candidate interactions of energetic dark matter upscattered by cosmic rays

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Despite strong evidence for dark matter’s (DM) existence, its particle nature remains unknown, and its identification is one of the most pressing problems in particle physics and astrophysics [1,2,3]. References [28,29,34,35,36,39] have explored the experimental signatures of DM particles being struck by CRs, upscattering to high energy, and interacting in direct-detection and/or neutrino experiments Such analyses have the additional advantage of being insensitive to the cosmogenic DM velocity distribution, a source of uncertainty for traditional direct-detection limits that has received much attention recently [40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48].

UPSCATTERED DARK MATTER FLUX
Cosmic ray and dark matter inputs
Cosmic ray-dark matter scattering
Propagation to the detector
EXPERIMENTAL SEARCH
Experiment and dataset description
Reconstructed physics quantities
Signal selection and background reduction
Final candidate dataset and cross-checks
DARK MATTER SEARCH RESULTS
Findings
CONCLUSIONS
Full Text
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