ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

Metastable Nuclear Isomers as Dark Matter Accelerators

189   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Harikrishnan Ramani
 تاريخ النشر 2019
  مجال البحث فيزياء
والبحث باللغة English




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

Inelastic dark matter and strongly interacting dark matter are poorly constrained by direct detection experiments since they both require the scattering event to deliver energy from the nucleus into the dark matter in order to have observable effects. We propose to test these scenarios by searching for the collisional de-excitation of meta-stable nuclear isomers by the dark matter particles. The longevity of these isomers is related to a strong suppression of $gamma$- and $beta$-transitions, typically inhibited by a large difference in the angular momentum for the nuclear transition. The collisional de-excitation by dark matter is possible since heavy dark matter particles can have a momentum exchange with the nucleus comparable to the inverse nuclear size, hence lifting tremendous angular momentum suppression of the nuclear transition. This de-excitation can be observed either by searching for the direct effects of the decaying isomer, or through the re-scattering or decay of excited dark matter states in a nearby conventional dark matter detector setup. Existing nuclear isomer sources such as naturally occurring $^{180m}$Ta, $^{137m}$Ba produced in decaying Cesium in nuclear waste, $^{177m}$Lu from medical waste, and $^{178m}$Hf from the Department of Energy storage can be combined with current dark matter detector technology to search for this class of dark matter.

قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

We show that a metastable dark matter candidate arises naturally from the conformal transformation between the Einstein metric, where gravitons are normalised states, and the Jordan metric dictating the coupling between gravity and matter. Despite be ing secluded from the Standard Model by a large scale above which the Jordan metric shows modifications to the Einstein frame metric, dark matter couples to the energy momentum tensor of the Higgs field in the primordial plasma primarily. This allows for the production of dark matter in a sufficient amount which complies with observations. The seclusion of dark matter makes it long-lived for masses $lesssim 1$ MeV, with a lifetime much above the age of the Universe and the present experimental limits. Such a dark matter scenario has clear monochromatic signatures generated by the decay of the dark matter candidate into neutrino and/or $gamma-$rays.
104 - Jeff A. Dror , Gilly Elor , 2019
Absorption of fermionic dark matter leads to a range of distinct and novel signatures at dark matter direct detection and neutrino experiments. We study the possible signals from fermionic absorption by nuclear targets, which we divide into two class es of four Fermi operators: neutral and charged current. In the neutral current signal, dark matter is absorbed by a target nucleus and a neutrino is emitted. This results in a characteristically different nuclear recoil energy spectrum from that of elastic scattering. The charged current channel leads to induced $beta$ decays in isotopes which are stable in vacuum as well as shifts of the kinematic endpoint of $ beta$ spectra in unstable isotopes. To confirm the possibility of observing these signals in light of other constraints, we introduce UV completions of example higher dimensional operators that lead to fermionic absorption signals and study their phenomenology. Most prominently, dark matter which exhibits fermionic absorption signals is necessarily unstable leading to stringent bounds from indirect detection searches. Nevertheless, we find a large viable parameter space in which dark matter is sufficiently long lived and detectable in current and future experiments.
We propose a model where a long-lived pseudoscalar EeV particle can be produced with sufficient abundance so as to account for the cold dark matter density, despite having a Planck mass suppressed coupling to the thermal bath. Connecting this state t o a hidden sterile neutrino sector through derivative couplings, induced by higher dimensional operators, allows one to account for light neutrino masses while having a lifetime that can be much larger than the age of the Universe. Moreover, the same derivative coupling accounts for the production of dark matter in the very first instant of the reheating. Given the sensitivity of the IceCube and ANITA collaborations, we study the possible signatures of such a model in the form of Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays in the neutrino sector, and show that such signals could be detected in the near future.
78 - Yu Hamada , Ryuichiro Kitano , 2021
We propose a scenario that the Electroweak-Skyrmion, a solitonic object made of the Higgs field and the electroweak gauge fields, is identified as an asymmetric dark matter. In this scenario, the relic abundance of the dark matter is related to the b aryon asymmetry of the Universe through a sphaleron-like process. We show that the observed ratio of dark matter abundance to the baryon asymmetry can be explained by this scenario with an appropriate choice of model parameters that is allowed by currently available experimental constraints.
We propose a novel thermal production mechanism for dark matter based on the idea that dark matter particles $chi$ can transform (`infect) heat bath particles $psi$: $chi psi rightarrow chi chi$. For a small initial abundance of $chi$ this induces an exponential growth in the dark matter number density, closely resembling the epidemic curves of a spreading pathogen after an initial outbreak. To quantify this relation we present a sharp duality between the Boltzmann equation for the dark matter number density and epidemiological models for the spread of infectious diseases. Finally we demonstrate that the exponential growth naturally stops before $chi$ thermalizes with the heat bath, corresponding to a triumphant `flattening of the curve that matches the observed dark matter abundance.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا