Stellar cooling, inelastic dark matter, and XENON

Abstract

We consider a novel scenario of dark photon-mediated inelastic dark matter to explain the white dwarf cooling excess suggested by its luminosity function, and the excess in electron recoil events at XENON1T. In the Sun, the dark photon $A^{\prime }$ is produced mainly via thermal processes, and the heavier dark matter ${\chi }_2$ is produced by the scattering of halo dark matter ${\chi }_1$ with electrons. The XENON1T signal arises primarily by solar $A^{\prime }$ scattering, and $A^{\prime }$ emission by white dwarfs accommodates the extra cooling while maintaining consistency with other stellar cooling observations. A tritium component in the XENON1T detector is also required. We show for parameters that explain the XENON1T data, but not the white dwarf cooling anomaly, that a second signal peak may be buried in the XENON1T data and revealable at XENONnT. However, the parameters that give the double peak in the spectrum are incompatible with constraints from horizontal branch stars.

arXiv comment14 pages, 7 figures. Version to appear in JHEAp

References in corpus (10)

• Excess Electronic Recoil Events in XENON1T
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• New stellar constraints on dark photons
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• Electric But Not Eclectic: Thermal Relic Dark Matter for the XENON1T Excess
• Expected Sensitivity to Galactic/Solar Axions and Bosonic Super-WIMPs based on the Axio-electric Effect in Liquid Xenon Dark Matter Detectors
• Limits on the neutrino magnetic dipole moment from the luminosity function of hot white dwarfs

Cited by in corpus (4)

• A Next-Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics
• Direct detection of dark energy: the XENON1T excess and future prospects
• Pushing the frontier of WIMPy inelastic dark matter: journey to the end of the periodic table
• Explorations of pseudo-Dirac dark matter having keV splittings and interacting via transition electric and magnetic dipole moments