New Experimental Constraints in a New Landscape for Composite Dark Matter

Recently, it was shown that the scattering cross sections for pointlike dark matter with nuclei cannot be significantly larger than the geometric cross sections of these nuclei. This invalidates many claimed experimental constraints on strongly interacting dark matter, leaving a large window of high-cross section parameter space unprobed. The only way for dark matter to have a cross section in this parameter space is for it to be a composite particle, with a geometric size much larger than that of a nucleus. We use a liquid scintillator-based dark matter detector to set new constraints on heavy, composite dark matter, closing off much of the newly enlarged window in dark matter parameter space.