Direct detection of dark matter WIMPs with cryogenic detectors like SuperCDMS, including a new kind of dark matter candidate with well-defined mass and couplings

There is increasing tension between experiment and the proposal that supersymmetry (susy) can explain dark matter. Here we survey the potential for cryogenic detectors like SuperCDMS to observe dark matter WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), with emphasis on both neutralinos and a new kind of dark matter candidate with well-defined mass and couplings [1]. Like the neutralino, this new candidate is charge neutral, with only weak and gravitational interactions; and it has a spin of 1/2 and an R-parity of -1, making it stable if its mass is less than that of the lowest mass superpartner. But its interactions --i.e., couplings to W and Z bosons -- are in a sense weaker than those of the neutralino, since they are either second-order or momentum-dependent. The relatively weak interactions of the present particles may then explain why dark matter particles have not yet been detected. Nevertheless, they constitute an ideal dark matter candidate in other respects. For example, since their mass is ~ 10-100 GeV and they are WIMPs, they would have been created in the early universe in about the right abundance to explain the astronomical observations.

[1] Roland E. Allen and Aritra Saha, `Mod. Phys. Lett. A 32, 1730022 (2017), arXiv:1706.00882 [hep-ph].