Speaker
Description
In this talk, we discuss loosely bound composite states of dark matter, where the binding energy per constituent particle is much lower than the constituent’s bare mass. In particular, we investigate the direct detection signatures of nuclear and molecular dark matter, in which constituents are separated by scales much larger than the inverse constituent mass. We find that these composites can have a very large scattering cross-section with Standard Model nuclei, scaling with nucleon number as $\sim A^4$. Furthermore, for some couplings, these composites produce sub-eV individual atomic recoils, while still depositing a large total amount of energy in a single passage through a detector. This implies an interesting new class of signatures for low-threshold direct detection.
