Speaker
Tran Quang Thong Nguyen
(Stockholm University)
Description
Jupiter is an excellent target for dark matter searches. However, the minimum testable dark matter mass is set by evaporation, where thermal interactions with Jovian material exceed the gravitational potential and remove dark matter from the planet, limiting search sensitivity. We show that in the case of leptophilic dark matter, evaporation is strongly suppressed because most electrons are confined into metallic and solid layers where %they completely fill the Fermi-Dirac distribution and
Pauli blocking forbids them from upscattering dark matter. We show that leptophilic dark matter remains trapped in Jupiter on Gyr timescales down to masses as low as $\sim$10 MeV, opening new sensitivities for sub-GeV dark matter searches.
Author
Tran Quang Thong Nguyen
(Stockholm University)
Co-authors
Carlos Blanco
Rebecca Leane
(SLAC)
Tim Linden