An Analytic Approach to Light Dark Matter Propagation

Abstract

If dark matter interacts too strongly with nuclei, it could be slowed to undetectable speeds in Earth's crust or atmosphere before ever reaching a detector. For sub-GeV dark matter, analytic approximations appropriate for heavier dark matter fail, necessitating the use of computationally expensive simulations. We present a new method of modeling attenuation of light dark matter in the Earth, based on the approximation that the scattering is isotropic in the lab frame. We show that this approach agrees well with Monte Carlo results, and can be much faster when the number of scatterings becomes large, as the runtime for Monte Carlo methods increases exponentially with cross section. We use this method to model attenuation for sub-dominant dark matter--that is, particles that make up a small fraction of the dark matter density--and show that previous work on sub-dominant dark matter overestimates the sensitivity of direct detection experiments.

5 pages, 4 figures. Text and figures updated to match the PRL version

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Dark Matter Annihilation inside Large Volume Neutrino Detectors
• Energy-dependent Boosted Dark Matter from Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background
• Dark Matter (H)eats Young Planets
• On the cosmology and terrestrial signals of sexaquark dark matter
• Attenuation of Cosmic Ray Electron Boosted Dark Matter
• Boosted Dark Matter From Centaurus A and Its Detection
• Dark Matter Attenuation Effects: Sensitivity Ceilings for Spin-Dependent and Spin-Independent Interactions
• Super-Kamiokande Strongly Constrains Leptophilic Dark Matter Capture in the Sun
• Dark Matter EFT Landscape Probed by QUEST-DMC
• Opening windows with Isospin-Violating Dark Matter