Death and Serious Injury by Dark Matter

Abstract

Macroscopic dark matter refers to a variety of dark matter candidates that would be expected to (elastically) scatter off of ordinary matter with a large geometric cross-section. A wide range of macro masses $M_X$ and cross-sections ${\sigma }_X$ remain unprobed. We show that over a wide region within the unexplored parameter space, collisions of a macro with a human body would result in serious injury or death. We use the absence of such unexplained impacts with a well-monitored subset of the human population to exclude a region bounded by ${\sigma }_X\ge 10^{-8}-10^{-7}$ cm${}^2$ and $M_X<50$ kg. Our results open a new window on dark matter: the human body as a dark matter detector.

Comments: 9 pages, 2 figure