A fraction of the dark matter may consist of a particle species that interacts much more strongly with the Standard Model than a typical weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) of similar mass. Such a strongly interacting dark matter component could have avoided detection in searches for WIMP-like dark matter through its interactions with the material in the atmosphere and the Earth that slow it down significantly before reaching detectors underground. These same interactions can also enhance the density of a strongly interacting dark matter species near the Earth’s surface to well above the local galactic dark matter density. In this work, we propose two new methods of detecting strongly interacting dark matter based on accelerating the enhanced population expected in the Earth through scattering. The first approach is to use underground nuclear accelerator beams to upscatter the ambient dark matter population into a WIMP-style detector located downstream. In the second technique, dark matter is upscattered with an intense thermal source and detected with a low-threshold dark matter detector. We also discuss potential candidates for strongly interacting dark matter, and we show that the scenario can be naturally realized with a hidden fermion coupled to a sub-GeV dark photon.

中文翻译：

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加速地球上的暗物质

一小部分暗物质可能由与标准模型相互作用的粒子种类组成，而不是类似质量的典型弱相互作用大质量粒子 (WIMP)。这种强烈相互作用的暗物质成分本可以避免在寻找类似 WIMP 的暗物质时被检测到，因为它与大气和地球中的物质相互作用，在到达地下探测器之前显着减慢它的速度。这些相同的相互作用还可以将地球表面附近强相互作用的暗物质物种的密度提高到远高于当地银河系暗物质密度。在这项工作中，我们提出了两种检测强相互作用暗物质的新方法，这些方法基于通过散射加速地球中预期的增强种群。第一种方法是使用地下核加速器光束将周围的暗物质群向上散射到位于下游的 WIMP 式探测器中。在第二种技术中，暗物质被强热源向上散射，并被低阈值暗物质探测器探测到。我们还讨论了强相互作用暗物质的潜在候选者，并且我们表明该场景可以通过与亚 GeV 暗光子耦合的隐藏费米子自然实现。