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14:00 Elena Pinetti
Title: Integral X-ray constraints on sub-GeV dark matter
Abstract:
Dark matter (DM) in cosmic structures is expected to produce signals originating from its particle physics nature, among which the electromagnetic emission represents a relevant opportunity. One of the major candidates for DM are weak-scale particles, however no convincing signal of these has been observed so far. For this reason, alternative candidates are getting increasing attention, notably sub-GeV particles, which are the subject of our work. The challenge in indirect detection of sub-GeV DM is that there is scarcity of competitive experiments in the energy range between 1 MeV and hundreds of MeV, meaning that we need to find alternative ways to study DM candidates with mass in this energy window. In our work we include in the total flux the contribution from Inverse-Compton scattering (ICS) over the low-energy photons in our galaxy, due to the electrons and positrons produced by DM particles. After the ICS, these radiation fields become X-rays with an energy covered by the INTEGRAL data, which we used to derive conservative bounds. We derived the strongest constraints at present time for DM particles with a mass between 150 MeV and 1.5 GeV.
14:30 Mukul Sholapurkar
Title: Sources of Low-energy Events in Sub-GeV Dark Matter Detectors
Abstract:
We demonstrate that standard radiative processes originating from high-energy backgrounds can produce large rates of low-energy events that are observed with direct-detection experiments searching for sub-GeV dark matter. In this talk, we will focus on Cherenkov radiation, which is produced from high-energy charged particles interacting with any non-conductive material found in dark matter detectors. We will show that these events constitute at least a sizable fraction of the single-electron events observed at SENSEI, and are also plausibly a large fraction of the observed low-energy events at SuperCDMS-HVeV. Our findings indicate clear avenues to mitigate such backgrounds at future detectors, and could have a significant impact on the design of such experiments.