arXiv subjects

Biprajit Mondal

Publications and source records attributed to Biprajit Mondal.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Not so good $ν$s for Higgsino dark matter as LZ excess: stringent limits from Super-Kamiokande and IceCube

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) collaboration has recently reported a single nuclear recoil event at a high recoil energy of about 250 keV. This has been interpreted as inelastic scattering of dark matter that is a supersymmetric Higgsino with a mass splitting between the neutral states of a few 100 keV. Such dark matter may be captured at high recoil in the Sun through scattering on heavy elements in it, and annihilate to $W^+W^-$ and $ZZ$, in turn giving rise to a neutrino flux detectable on Earth. Using measurements of atmospheric electron- and muon-neutrino fluxes by Super-Kamiokande and IceCube, we constrain thermal and non-thermal Higgsino dark matter, excluding inter-state mass splittings $\lesssim 557$ keV. This disfavors Higgsino-like interpretations of the LZ event for standard halo velocities.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2026

Direct detection of electromagnetically interacting ultraheavy dark matter

At a level too faint for astronomy, particle dark matter may interact with Standard Model states via the photon. We derive limits from direct detection experiments on photon-mediated nuclear interactions up to operator dimension-6, viz., via a millicharge, charge radius, electric and magnetic dipole moment, and anapole moment, up to dark matter masses $\lesssim 10^{17}$ GeV, where detectors become flux-limited. We derive constraints for XENON1T, XENONnT, LZ, PANDAX-II, PANDAX-4T, DarkSide-50, DEAP-3600, PICO-60, and CDMS-II, and estimate future sensitivities for the multi-deca-tonne scale experiments DarkSide-20k, DARWIN/XLZD, PANDAX-xT, and Argo. Special attention is paid to millicharged dark matter, for which we constrain new parameter space by deriving the ceiling on sensitivity to its electric charge, arising from the nuclear-vs-electron recoil discriminants used in liquid argon and bubble chamber detectors. This result goes beyond ceilings previously identified in liquid xenon and semiconductor detectors from electron recoil vetoes. In particular, the ceiling from PICO-60 closes a large window between direct detection and neutrino experiment limits for dark matter masses below $10^{12}$ GeV.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

The neutrino roof: Single-scatter ceilings in dark matter direct detection

We identify the maximum cross sections probed by single-scatter ``WIMP" searches in dark matter direct detection. Due to Poisson fluctuations in scatter multiplicity, these ceilings scale logarithmically with mass for heavy dark matter and often lie in regions probed by multiscatter searches. Using a generalized formula for single-scatter event rates we recast WIMP searches by the quintal-to-tonne scale detectors XENON1T, XENONnT, LZ, PANDAX-II, PANDAX-4T, DarkSide-50 and DEAP-3600 to obtain ceilings and floors up to a few $10^{17}$ GeV mass and $10^{-22}$ cm$^2$ per-nucleus cross section. We do this for coherent, geometric, isospin-violating xenophobic and argophobic spin-independent scattering, and neutron-only and proton-only spin-dependent scattering. Future large-exposure detectors would register an almost irreducible background of atmospheric neutrinos that would determine a dark matter sensitivity ceiling that we call the ``neutrino roof", in analogy with the well-studied ``neutrino floor". Accounting for this background, we estimate the reaches of the 10$-$100 tonne scale DarkSide-20k, DARWIN/XLZD, PANDAX-xT, and Argo, which would probe many decades of unconstrained parameter space up to the Planck mass, as well as of $10^3-10^4$ tonne scale noble liquid detectors that have been proposed in synergy with neutrino experiments.

hep-ph↗