Millicharged Atomic Dark Matter and Dark Matter Direct Detection

by Wei Xue (INFN, SISSA, Trieste)

Wednesday 12 Dec 2012, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

4/2-011 - TH common room (CERN)

I will present a simplified version of the atomic dark matter scenario, in which charged dark constituents are bound into atoms analogous to hydrogen by a massless hidden sector U(1) gauge interaction. We map out the parameter space that is consistent with cosmological constraints and direct searches. In the special case where the dark ''electron'' and ''proton'' are degenerate in mass, inelastic hyperfine transitions can explain the CoGeNT excess events. Inspired by this, we analyze several classes of light dark matter models with respect to CoGeNT modulated and unmodulated data, and constraints from CDMS, XENON10 and XENON100.