Monochromatic dark neutrinos and boosted dark matter in noble liquid direct detection

Abstract

If dark matter self-annihilates into neutrinos or a second component of ("boosted") dark matter that is nucleophilic, the annihilation products may be detected with high rates via coherent nuclear scattering. A future multi-ten-tonne liquid xenon detector such as darwin, and a multi-hundredtonne liquid argon detector, argo, would be sensitive to the flux of these particles in complementary ranges of 10-1000 MeV dark matter masses. We derive these sensitivities after accounting for atmospheric and diffuse supernova neutrino backgrounds, and realistic nuclear recoil acceptances. We find that their constraints on the dark neutrino flux may surpass neutrino detectors such as Super-Kamiokande, and that they would extensively probe parametric regions that explain the missing satellites problem in neutrino portal models. The xenont and borexino experiments currently restrict the effective baryonic coupling of thermal boosted dark matter to 10 − 100 × the weak interaction, but darwin and argo would probe down to couplings 10 times smaller. Detection of boosted dark matter with baryonic couplings ∼ 10 −3 − 10 −2 × the weak coupling could indicate that the dark matter density profile in the centers of galactic halos become cored, rather than cuspy, through annihilations. This work demonstrates that, alongside liquid xenon, liquid argon direct detection technology would emerge a major player in dark matter searches within and beyond the wimp paradigm.

Neutrino portals to dark matter

“…Similarly, future DM and neutrino detectors such as DARWIN [60] and DUNE [61] will be able to further constrain the DM annihilation cross section to neutrinos. DARWIN will set stronger bounds for DM masses between 100 MeV and 1 GeV [62], while DUNE will be able to exclude thermal DM masses between 25 and 100 MeV [52].…”

Mononeutrino at DUNE: New signals from neutrinophilic thermal dark matter

“…New dark-matter-neutrino interactions can leave important imprint in various aspects of cosmology, such as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) [17][18][19], and the structure formation from large to small scales [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Experimentally, neutrinos from dark matter annihilation at the center of the galaxy or the sun have long been proposed and searched for using neutrino telescopes [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. The attenuation effect in the flux of high energy neutrinos from distant astrophysical sources due to the travel through the cosmic dark matter background has also been explored in Refs.…”

Foraging for dark matter in large volume liquid scintillator neutrino detectors with multiscatter events

“…Other proposed searches for dark matter that deposits enough energy to exceed the ∼ MeV threshold of neutrino detectors include dark matter that destroys target baryons [6][7][8][9], that yields annihilation or decay products detectable in these experiments [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], that deposits its entire (mass + kinetic) energy [21], is produced at high-intensity accelerators or radioactive sources [22], is accelerated by astrophysical sources [23], or is bounced off energetic cosmic rays [24,25]. All these approaches (excepting the last one) require specific models with a number of massive dark sector states.…”