Inelastic Dark Matter Electron Scattering and the XENON1T Excess

Abstract

Detection of electron recoils by dark matter (DM) may reveal the structure of the dark sector. We consider a scenario where a heavier DM particle inelastically scatters off an electron and is converted into a lighter DM particle. A small mass difference between the two DM particles is transferred into electron recoil energy. We investigate the DM-electron interaction mediated by a massive dark photon and evaluate the inelastic DM scattering rate, taking account of the atomic structure. It is found that the scattering rate is significantly enhanced because of the small mass splitting, which allows for a small momentum transfer matched with the size of the electron wave function. We show that there exists a viable parameter space which explains the excess of electron recoil events around 2-3 keV recently reported by the XENON1T experiment.

7 pages, 5 figures, version to be published in Physics Letters B

References in corpus (10)

• Search for a dark photon in e+e- collisions at BABAR
• Bosonic super-WIMPs as keV-scale dark matter
• Search for light massive gauge bosons as an explanation of the $(g-2{)}_{\mu }$ anomaly at MAMI
• Revisiting the axion bounds from the Galactic white dwarf luminosity function
• Search for invisible decays of sub-GeV dark photons in missing-energy events at the CERN SPS
• Direct Detection of Multi-component Secluded WIMPs
• Model Independent Bounds on Magnetic Moments of Majorana Neutrinos
• Search for light vector boson production in $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}\gamma$ interactions with the KLOE experiment
• Messengers from the Early Universe: Cosmic Neutrinos and Other Light Relics
• Off-Diagonal Dark-Matter Phenomenology: Exploring Enhanced Complementarity Relations in Non-Minimal Dark Sectors

Cited by in corpus (28)

• A Next-Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics
• Direct detection of dark energy: the XENON1T excess and future prospects
• One-loop running of dimension-six Higgs-neutrino operators and implications of a large neutrino dipole moment
• Solar Neutrino Scattering with Electron into Massive Sterile Neutrino
• Self-interacting Inelastic Dark Matter in the light of XENON1T excess
• The ups and downs of inelastic dark matter: Electron recoils from terrestrial upscattering
• Exploring properties of long-lived particles in inelastic dark matter models at Belle II
• Spin-dependent sub-GeV Inelastic Dark Matter-electron scattering and Migdal effect: (I). Velocity Independent Operator
• Pushing the frontier of WIMPy inelastic dark matter: journey to the end of the periodic table
• A multi-component SIMP model with $U(1{)}_X\to Z_2\times Z_3$
• Boosted Self-Interacting Dark Matter and XENON1T Excess
• Xenon-1T excess as a possible signal of a sub-GeV hidden sector dark matter
• Detection of Inelastic Dark Matter via Electron Recoils in SENSEI
• Solar Active-Sterile Neutrino Conversion with Atomic Effects at Dark Matter Direct Detection Experiments
• Halo-Independent Analysis of Direct Dark Matter Detection Through Electron Scattering
• Axion emission from nuclear magnetic dipole transitions
• Exothermic dark mesons in light of electron recoil excess at XENON1T
• Terrestrial Probes of Electromagnetically Interacting Dark Radiation
• GeV Scale Inelastic Dark Matter with Dark Photon Mediator via Direct Detection and Cosmological/Laboratory Constraints
• Inelastic Dark Matter from Dark Higgs Boson Decays at FASER
• Resolving XENON Excess With Decaying Cold Dark Matter
• Connecting Low scale Seesaw for Neutrino Mass to Inelastic sub-GeV Dark Matter with Abelian Gauge Symmetry
• Explorations of pseudo-Dirac dark matter having keV splittings and interacting via transition electric and magnetic dipole moments
• Explaining The XENON1T Excess With Light Goldstini Dark Matter
• Dark Fluxes from Accreting Black Holes and Direct Detections
• Inelastic dark matter, small scale problems, and the XENON1T excess
• Stellar cooling, inelastic dark matter, and XENON
• Inelastic Dark Matter at the Fermilab Short Baseline Neutrino Program