Constraining Dark Matter with Cosmic Ray Interactions

The bulk of the dark matter in the galaxy is believed to have velocity of order several hundred km/s. However, it has recently been shown that cosmic ray collisions with dark matter may accelerate a small fraction of the galactic dark matter to much higher velocities. This boosted dark matter would transfer far more energy to target nuclei or electrons in a detector than it would if it were traveling at the typical dark matter speed in the galaxy. This has recently been used to place constraints on low-mass dark matter, to which direct detection experiments are usually blind because of their threshold energy. We explore various avenues to improve the sensitivity of these studies.