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Dark Matter (DM) is an elusive form of matter which has been postulated to explain astronomical observations through its gravitational effects on stars and galaxies, gravitational lensing of light around these, and through its imprint on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This indirect evidence implies that DM accounts for as much as 84.5% of all matter in our Universe, yet it has so far evaded all attempts at direct detection, leaving such confirmation and the consequent discovery of its nature as one of the biggest challenges in modern physics. Here we present a novel form of low-mass DM $chi$ that would have been missed by all experiments so far. While its large interaction strength might at first seem unlikely, neither constraints from particle physics nor cosmological/astronomical observations are sufficient to rule out this type of DM, and it motivates our proposal for direct detection by optomechanics technology which should soon be within reach, namely, through the precise position measurement of a levitated mesoscopic particle which will be perturbed by elastic collisions with $chi$ particles. We show that a recently proposed nanoparticle matter-wave interferometer, originally conceived for tests of the quantum superposition principle, is sensitive to these collisions, too.
We consider searches for the inelastic scattering of low-mass dark matter at direct detection experiments, using the Migdal effect. We find that there are degeneracies between the dark matter mass and the mass splitting that are difficult to break. U
The LUX experimental group has just announced the most stringent upper limits so far obtained on the cross section of WIMP-nucleon elastic scattering [1]. This result is a factor of two to five below the previous best upper limit [2] and effectively
In this article we investigate the benefits of increasing the maximum nuclear recoil energy analysed in dark matter (DM) direct detection experiments. We focus on elastic DM-nucleus interactions, and work within the framework of effective field theor
Identifying the true theory of dark matter depends crucially on accurately characterizing interactions of dark matter (DM) with other species. In the context of DM direct detection, we present a study of the prospects for correctly identifying the lo
We examine the effect of nuclear response functions, as laid out in [Fitzpatrick et al, arXiv:1203.3542], on dark matter (DM) direct detection in the context of well-motivated UV completions, including electric and magnetic dipoles, anapole, spin-orb