Direct constraints on charged excitations of dark matter

Abstract

If the neutral component of weak-scale dark matter is accompanied by a charged excitation separated by a mass gap of less than ~20 MeV, WIMPs can form stable bound states with nuclei. We show that the recent progress in experiments searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay sets the first direct constraint on the exoergic reaction of WIMP-nucleus bound state formation. We calculate the rate for such process in representative models and show that the double-beta decay experiments provide unique sensitivity to a large fraction of parameter space of the WIMP doublet model, complementary to constraints imposed by cosmology and direct collider searches.

Final version. Published in PRL 109, 251302 (2012)

References in corpus (7)

• Search for Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay in ${}^{136}$Xe with EXO-200
• Big Bang Nucleosynthesis as a Probe of New Physics
• Search for heavy long-lived charged particles in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV
• Recent Progress in Double Beta Decay
• Search for Solar Axions Produced in $p(d,{}^3\mathrm{He})\mathrm{A}$ Reaction with Borexino Detector
• Resonant Dark Matter
• Resonant scattering and recombination of pseudo-degenerate WIMPs

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Kiloton-scale xenon detectors for neutrinoless double beta decay and other new physics searches
• Very Degenerate Higgsino Dark Matter
• Search for MeV Electron Recoils from Dark Matter in EXO-200
• Search for Charged Excited States of Dark Matter with KamLAND-Zen