Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | 2020 May 04
Current experiments’ detectors and data analyses efforts could be refocused to seek out newly suggested types of dark matter signals that may have been overlooked
Dark matter has so far defied every type of detector designed to find it. Because of its huge gravitational footprint in space, we know dark matter must make up about 85 percent of the total mass of the universe, but we don’t yet know what it’s made of.
Several large experiments that hunt for dark matter have searched for signs of dark matter particles knocking into atomic nuclei via a process known as scattering, which can produce tiny flashes of light and other signals in these interactions.
Now a new study ... suggests new paths for catching the signals of dark matter particles that have their energy absorbed by these nuclei.
The absorption process could give an affected atom a kick that causes it to eject a lighter, energized particle such as an electron, and it might produce other types of signals, too, depending on the nature of the dark matter particle.
The study focuses mostly on those cases where an electron or neutrino is ejected as the dark matter particle strikes an atom’s nucleus. ...
Direct Detection Signals from Absorption of Fermionic Dark Matter ~ Jeff A. Dror, Gilly Elor, Robert McGehee
- Physical Review Letters 124(18):1301 (08 May 2020) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.181301
- arXiv.org > hep-ph > arXiv:1905.12635 > 29 May 2019