New Spectral Features from Bound Dark Matter

Abstract

We demonstrate that dark matter particles gravitationally bound to the Earth can induce a characteristic nuclear recoil signal at low energies in direct detection experiments. The new spectral feature we predict can provide the ultimate smoking gun for dark matter discovery for experiments with positive signal but unclear background. The new feature is universal, in that the ratio of bound over halo dark matter event rates at detectors is independent of the dark matter-nucleon cross section.