Inelastic Dark Matter and High-Energy Recoil Signatures in LZ

Abstract

We study the inelastic dark matter (iDM) that consists of two-component dark matter particles $(χ_1,χ_2)$ and serves as a minimal extension beyond the commonly used one-component DM models. A distinctive feature of such iDM scattering with the target nuclei is to favorably produce signals at high nuclear recoil (NR) energy region in both exothermic and endothermic processes. In particular, for the exothermic dark matter scenario, the signal does not rely on the tail of the Boltzmann velocity distribution. As a result, the required DM-nucleus scattering cross section is significantly reduced, which in turn helps to substantially relax the stringent constraints imposed by IceCube neutrino searches. Using the inelastic DM-nucleus scattering, we naturally explain the newly reported event excess at high recoil energy with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment.