Exothermic dark-photon dark matter and the LZ high-recoil event: finite-reheating constraints

Abstract

An excited dark-matter state can produce a high-energy nuclear recoil by releasing its mass splitting in a collision. Motivated by the $248$~keV LUX--ZEPLIN candidate, we study freeze-in of a $45$~GeV pseudo-Dirac particle with a $1$~MeV splitting and a $1$~GeV dark photon during non-instantaneous reheating. We choose a recoil normalization compatible with the published INTEGRAL/SPI three-photon decay limit. It predicts $0.43$ events in the LZ window and retains the reference recoil shape. Including both dark-photon and $Z$ exchange, we calculate production and entropy dilution for backgrounds with $T\propto a^{-\alpha }$ and ${\rho }_{\varphi }\propto a^{-3(1+\omega )}$. For $\Tmax=m_χ$, the observed abundance requires $\Trh=1.32$~GeV for matter-like constant-width reheating, $3.09$~GeV for quartic oscillations with scalar decay, and $0.588$~GeV for quartic oscillations with constant width, compared with $4.10$~GeV for instantaneous reheating. These finite-reheating solutions are insensitive to increasing $\Tmax$ above $m_{\chi }$. For $\Tmax\geq m_χ$, adiabatic kination has no solution with $\Trh>5.96$~MeV, the BBN-motivated cutoff adopted for our scans. At ${\alpha }_D=10^{-10}$, the estimated thermal-mediator source is below $0.2\%$ of the Standard Model source, and self-conversion does not appreciably deplete the excited population. The calculation relates an exothermic recoil benchmark to the production and dilution history before radiation domination.

arXiv comment19 pages, 6 figures