Powered by Indico
v3.2
Abstract: All attempts to directly detect dark matter particles scattering on nuclei suffer from the partial or total loss of sensitivity for sub-GeV DM masses, simply because the typical momenta of such light particles are not sufficient to induce recoils above the detector thresholds. Somewhat surprisingly, even very large scattering cross sections thus remain unconstrained in a significant part of parameter space. Here we point out the inevitable existence of a subdominant, but highly energetic, component of dark matter generated through collisions with cosmic rays. We show in detail how the subsequent scattering inside conventional direct detection experiments, but also neutrino detectors sensitive to nuclear recoils, leads to a strengthening of existing limits on the scattering cross section by up to five orders of magnitude.
Remarkably, these limits in principle hold for arbitrarily small dark matter
masses.