Low-mass extension of direct detection bounds on WIMP-quark and WIMP-gluon effective interactions using the Migdal effect

Abstract

Updating a previous analysis where we used elastic nuclear recoils we study the Migdal effect to extend to low WIMP masses the direct detection bounds to operators up to dimension 7 of the relativistic effective field theory describing WIMP interactions with quarks and gluons. To this aim we include in our analysis the data of the XENON1T, SuperCDMS, COSINE-100, and DarkSide-50 experiments and assume a standard Maxwellian for the WIMP velocity distribution. We find that the bounds can reach down to a WIMP mass $\simeq$20 MeV, although in the case of higher-dimension operators the energy scale of the ensuing constraints may be inconsistent with the validity of the effective theory.