Direct detection of cosmic ray-boosted puffy dark matter

For the light relativistic dark matter (DM) boosted by high energy cosmic ray, its scattering cross section with the nucleon is sensitively dependent on the momentum-transfer and such an dependence is caused by the mediator in the scattering. For puffy DM particle with a size, the momentum-transfer dependence can also arise from the DM radius effect. All these momentum-transfer dependences should be considered. In this note we study the direct detection limits on the cosmic ray-boosted puffy DM for a simplified model with a light mediator. For comparison, we first re-derive the direct detection limits on the cosmic rayboosted point-like DM. We display the limits on various planes of parameters and find that the limits for the cosmic ray-boosted puffy DM are stronger than for the point-like DM. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/). Funded by SCOAP3.

Automated summary

This study investigates the dependency of the scattering cross section of light relativistic dark matter boosted by high-energy cosmic rays on momentum transfer and mediator, and explores the direct detection limits on cosmic ray-boosted puffy dark matter in a simplified model. The results show that the limits for cosmic ray-boosted puffy dark matter are stronger than for point-like dark matter.