Detection of Inelastic Dark Matter via Electron Recoils in SENSEI

Abstract

The low-threshold experiment SENSEI, which uses the ultralow-noise silicon Skipper-CCD to explore light dark matter from the halo, has achieved the most rigorous limitations on light DM-electron scattering cross section. In this work, we investigate the inelastic DM-electron scattering process with the SENSEI data and derive the constraints on the inelastic dark matter model with a $U(1)$ gauge boson as the mediator. Comparing with elastic scattering process, we find that the down-scattering process with the mass splitting $\delta \equiv m_{{\chi }_2}-m_{{\chi }_1}<0$ is more strongly constrained while the up-scattering process $\delta >0$ gets the weaker limits. For the down-scattering process with mass splitting $\delta \sim -5$ eV, the DM mass $m_{\chi }$ can be excluded down to as low as 0.1 MeV.

Comments: 4 figures, 1 table, some discussions and references added; match the published version in PRD