Exotic Dark Matter Search with the Majorana Demonstrator
Open Access
- 23 January 2024
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review Letters
- Vol. 132 (4) , 041001
Abstract
With excellent energy resolution and ultralow-level radiogenic backgrounds, the high-purity germanium detectors in the Majorana Demonstrator enable searches for several classes of exotic dark matter (DM) models. In this work, we report new experimental limits on keV-scale sterile neutrino DM via the transition magnetic moment from conversion to active neutrinos . We report new limits on fermionic dark matter absorption () and sub-GeV DM-nucleus scattering (), and new exclusion limits for bosonic dark matter (axionlike particles and dark photons). These searches utilize the (1–100)-keV low-energy region of a 37.5-kg y exposure collected by the Demonstrator between May 2016 and November 2019 using a set of -enriched detectors whose surface exposure time was carefully controlled, resulting in extremely low levels of cosmogenic activation.
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Funding Information
- U.S. Department of Energy (DE-AC02-05CH11231, DE-AC05-00OR22725, DE-AC05-76RL0130, DE-FG02-97ER41020, DE-FG02-97ER41033, DE-FG02-97ER41041, DE-SC0012612, DE-SC0014445, DE-SC0018060, DE-SC0022339, LANLEM77, LANLEM78)
- National Science Foundation (MRI-0923142, PHY-1003399, PHY-1102292, PHY-1206314, PHY-1614611, PHY-1812409, PHY-1812356, PHY-2111140)
- Laboratory Directed Research and Development
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
- South Dakota Board of Regents
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (SAPIN-2017-00023)
- Canada Foundation for Innovation
- National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
- Particle Astrophysics Program and Nuclear Physics Program
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