Metastable Nuclear Isomers as Dark Matter Accelerators

Abstract

Inelastic dark matter and strongly interacting dark matter are poorly constrained by direct detection experiments since they both require the scattering event to deliver energy from the nucleus into the dark matter in order to have observable effects. We propose to test these scenarios by searching for the collisional de-excitation of meta-stable nuclear isomers by the dark matter particles. The longevity of these isomers is related to a strong suppression of $\gamma$- and $\beta$-transitions, typically inhibited by a large difference in the angular momentum for the nuclear transition. The collisional de-excitation by dark matter is possible since heavy dark matter particles can have a momentum exchange with the nucleus comparable to the inverse nuclear size, hence lifting tremendous angular momentum suppression of the nuclear transition. This de-excitation can be observed either by searching for the direct effects of the decaying isomer, or through the re-scattering or decay of excited dark matter states in a nearby conventional dark matter detector setup. Existing nuclear isomer sources such as naturally occurring ${}^{180m}$Ta, ${}^{137m}$Ba produced in decaying Cesium in nuclear waste, ${}^{177m}$Lu from medical waste, and ${}^{178m}$Hf from the Department of Energy storage can be combined with current dark matter detector technology to search for this class of dark matter.

13 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Atlas of Nuclear Isomers -- Second Edition
• Expanding Nuclear Physics Horizons with the Gamma Factory
• Earth-bound Milli-charge Relics
• Search for dark matter induced de-excitation of ${}^{180}$Ta${}^{\mathrm{m}}$
• Dynamical control of nuclear isomer depletion via electron vortex beams
• The ups and downs of inelastic dark matter: Electron recoils from terrestrial upscattering
• A Composite Solution to the Neutron Bottle Anomaly
• Dark Matter Induced Power in Quantum Devices
• Accelerating Earth-Bound Dark Matter
• Dark Matter Annihilation inside Large Volume Neutrino Detectors
• Constraints on the decay of ${}^{180m}$Ta
• Pushing the frontier of WIMPy inelastic dark matter: journey to the end of the periodic table
• An Analytic Approach to Light Dark Matter Propagation
• A search for rare and induced nuclear decays in hafnium
• Optimal Celestial Bodies for Dark Matter Detection
• Enhancing Direct Detection of Higgsino Dark Matter
• Direct determination of the excitation energy of quasi-stable isomer ${}^{180m}$Ta
• Deep-underground search for the decay of 180m-Ta with an ultra-low-background HPGe detector
• Dark Matter Search with the Nuclear Isomer Ta-180m
• Inelastic Dark Matter at the Fermilab Short Baseline Neutrino Program
• The Terrestrial Density of Strongly-Coupled Relics
• Earth-Catalyzed Detection of Magnetic Inelastic Dark Matter with Photons in Large Underground Detectors