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# 26th International Conference on Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions (SUSY2018)

23-27 July 2018
Barcelona
Europe/Zurich timezone

## Sub-MeV Dark Matter Interactions with Electrons: Cosmological Constraints and Detection Prospects

24 Jul 2018, 15:50
20m
Room C

Talk (closed)

### Speaker

Benjamin Lehmann (UC Santa Cruz)

### Description

Sub-MeV dark matter remains unconstrained by direct detection, and there are several well-motivated candidates in this mass range. Electron recoil experiments have been proposed as a technique to detect such a light particle, but little is known about the extent of cosmological restrictions on a generic light species coupled to electrons. We study cosmological constraints on a light dark matter particle coupled to electrons in the framework of an effective field theory, which subsumes a broad class of models with a heavy mediator. We study constraints from primordial nucleosynthesis, the dark matter relic abundance, and the effective number of neutrino species ($N_{\mathrm{eff}}$) at CMB formation. We demonstrate the implications of our results for detection prospects in electron recoil experiments, and highlight the regions of parameter space which may be amenable to direct detection by such techniques.

Parallel Session Dark Matter, Astroparticle Physics

### Primary authors

Francesco D'Eramo (University of Padua) Benjamin Lehmann (UC Santa Cruz)