1209.6358 (Haipeng An et al.)

Direct constraints on charged excitations of dark matter    [PDF]

Haipeng An, Maxim Pospelov, Josef Pradler

If the neutral component of weak-scale dark matter is accompanied by a charged excitation separated by a mass gap of less than ~20 MeV, WIMPs can form stable bound states with nuclei. We show that the recent progress in experiments searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay sets the first direct constraint on the exoergic reaction of WIMP-nucleus bound state formation. We calculate the rate for such process in representative models and show that the double-beta decay experiments provide unique sensitivity to a large fraction of parameter space of the WIMP doublet model, complementary to constraints imposed by cosmology and direct collider searches.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.6358