4D Seminar — Itay Bloch (UC Berkeley/LBL) “Millicharged DM Distribution: From Galaxy formation to Underground Experiments”

Seminar Organizer


Event Details


Abstract: As requested, I’ll start my talk with a “brief” introduction to myself, and my past and current research interests, and then transition to focusing on one specific project about millicharged DM. The abstract for that second part is: The possibility of having DM (or a fraction of it) charged under a dark U(1) which mixes with the U(1)EM has been of interest for many years. Many different experiments search for such a millicharged DM (MCDM), under the assumption that its velocity would be Maxwell Boltzmann distributed. However, our galaxy and local environment have a variety of effects that make this assumption highly non trivial. In this talk, I will discuss the effects of galactic magnetic fields, collisions with Cosmic rays, acceleration from Supernovae remnants, and energy losses due collisions with particles in the interstellar medium on the velocity distribution of MCDM outside the solar system. Furthermore, to arrive at an underground detector, the MCDM would need to pass through the solar wind, not be deflected by earth’s magnetic field, and pass through earth’s crust to reach the underground lab. We will discuss these effects as well. I will show some preliminary results from this ongoing calculation, and discuss how the different aspects of it can be performed more accurately in the future.