Speaker
Josef Pradler
(Austrian Academy of Sciences (AT))
Description
Dark matter detectors built primarily to probe elastic scattering of WIMPs on nuclei are also precise probes of light, weakly coupled particles that may be absorbed by the detector material. Ensuing constraints on the minimal model of dark matter comprised of long-lived vector states V (dark photons) in the 0.01-100 keV mass range are presented. The absence of an ionization signal in direct detection experiments such as XENON10 and XENON100 places a very strong constraint on the dark photon mixing angle, exceeding the indirect bounds derived from stellar energy loss considerations over a significant fraction of the available mass range; the talk is based on arXiv:1412.8378.
