[Triumf-seminars] TRIUMF Theory Seminar today at 13:00

[TRIUMF Seminars]

Date/Time: Wed 2019-09-11 at 13:00

Location:  Theory Room         

Speaker:   Gilly Elor (U Washington)

Title:     Direct Detection Signals from Absorption of Fermionic Dark Matter

Abstract: Experiments designed to directly detect dark matter employ large volumes of target material upon which an incoming dark matter particle can scatter, and the energy of the recoiling target nucleus (or electron) can be measured. To date, such experiments have not observed any hint of GeV scale dark matter elastically scattering off target nuclei. Today, I will present a new class of direct detection signals - absorption of fermionic dark matter, arising from higher dimensional operators which allow an incoming dark matter particle to impart its mass energy on a target. Dark matter absorbed by a target nucleus results in a characteristically different nuclear recoil energy spectrum than that of elastic scattering. Additionally, absorption through a  "charged current" operator leads to induced beta decays in isotopes which are otherwise stable in vacuum. Dark matter in such models is necessarily unstable leading to stringent bounds from indirect detection searches. Nevertheless, there exists a large, previously unexplored, parameter space in which dark matter, with mass well below the GeV scale, is sufficiently long lived and leads to fermionic absorption signals detectable at current and future dark matter direct detection and neutrino experiments



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