Cosmic ray boosted sub-GeV gravitationally interacting dark matter in direct detection

Abstract

Abstract Detections of non-gravitational interactions of massive dark matter (DM) with visible sector so far have given null results. The DM may communicate with the ordinary matter only through gravitational interaction. Besides, the majority of traditional direct detections have poor sensitivities for light DM because of the small recoil energy. Thanks to the high energy cosmic rays (CRs), the light DM can be boosted by scattering with CRs and thus may be detected in the ongoing experiments. In this work, we derive the exclusion limits on the cosmic ray boosted sub-GeV DM with gravitational mediator from the Xenon1T data. It turns out that a sizable region of such a cosmic ray boosted DM can be excluded by the current data.