2010/04/05 by Rouven Essig, Essig, Rouven, Jared Kaplan +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1004.0691
31 text pages, 4 figures, revision includes corrected Germanium quenching factor and clarified text in Sec. 5
arxiv created 2010/06/14 · arxiv updated 2015/03/13
TeV-mass dark matter charged under a new GeV-scale gauge force can explain electronic cosmic-ray anomalies. We propose that the CoGeNT and DAMA direct detection experiments are observing scattering of light stable states -- "GeV-Matter" -- that are charged under this force and constitute a small fraction of the dark matter halo. Dark higgsinos in a supersymmetric dark sector are natural candidates for GeV-Matter that scatter off protons with a universal cross-section of 5 x 10-38 cm2 and can naturally be split by 10-30 keV so that their dominant interaction with protons is down-scattering. As an example, down-scattering of an O(5) GeV dark higgsino can simultaneously explain the spectra observed by both CoGeNT and DAMA. The event rates in these experiments correspond to a GeV-Matter abundance of 0.2-1% of the halo mass density. This abundance can arise directly from thermal freeze-out at weak coupling, or from the late decay of an unstable TeV-scale WIMP. Our proposal can be tested by searches for exotics in the BaBar and Belle datasets.