%0 Journal Article
%T Milli-Interacting Dark Matter Interpretation of the Direct-Search Experiments
%A Quentin Wallemacq
%J Advances in High Energy Physics
%D 2014
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2014/525208
%X We reinterpret the results of the direct searches for dark matter in terms of milli-interacting dark particles. The model reproduces the positive results from DAMA/LIBRA and CoGeNT and is consistent with the absence of signal in the XENON100, CDMS-II/Ge, and LUX detectors. Dark atoms, interacting with standard atoms through a kinetic mixing between photons and dark photons and a mass mixing of mesons with dark scalars, diffuse elastically in terrestrial matter where they deposit all their energy. Reaching underground detectors through gravity at thermal energies, they form bound states with nuclei of the active medium by radiative capture, which causes the emission of photons that produce the observed signals. The parameter space of the model is explored and regions reproducing the results at the 2 level are obtained for each experiment. 1. Introduction Dark matter has been one of the most persistent enigmas in astrophysics since an invisible kind of matter was suggested in 1933 by Zwicky as an explanation to the missing mass between galaxies. Nowadays, the presence of dark matter is known at all cosmological scales and it is mostly believed that it is due to a unique species of collisionless particles, whose nature remains a mystery. One way to solve part of the problem is to observe directly these weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in underground detectors. Such direct searches for dark matter have started in the late 1990£¿s and have led today to stunning results. The DAMA/LIBRA [1, 2] and CoGeNT [3, 4] experiments both have performed temporal analyses of their signals and confirmed the presence of an annual modulation of the event rates with statistical significances of 9.3 and 2.8 , respectively. CRESST-II [5] and recently CDMS-II/Si [6] support these results with the observation of events in their detectors that cannot be due to background. On the other hand, XENON100 [7], CDMS-II/Ge [8], and recently LUX [9] exclude any detection. The current problem is that these experiments seem to come into conflict when their results are interpreted in terms of WIMPs producing nuclear recoils by colliding on nuclei in the detectors, although a more precise account for theoretical and experimental uncertainties could improve the status of WIMPs in that field. The tensions between experiments with positive results and the apparent incompatibility of the latter with experiments with negative results has led to considering other dark matter models that could provide new frameworks to reinterpret the data. Among these, mirror matter [10], millicharged
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ahep/2014/525208/