2024/07/30 by Ella Iles, Iles, Ella, Saniya Heeba +3
Engineering · #Industrial Vision Systems and Defect Detection
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.21096
We show that dark matter direct detection experiments are sensitive to the existence of particles with a small effective charge (for instance, via couplings to a kinetically mixed, low-mass dark photon). Our forecasts do not depend on these particles comprising a significant fraction of the dark matter. Rather, these experiments are sensitive to the irreducible abundance produced in the early universe through the freeze-in mechanism. We find that ongoing and proposed direct detection experiments will have world-leading sensitivity to effective charges Q∼ 10-12 across nine orders of magnitude in mass, corresponding to a dark matter sub-fraction as low as ∼ 10-3.