Theory HEP Seminar

Probing Charged Excited States of Dark Matter

Haipeng An

Perimeter Institute

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