Speaker
Description
When Sub-GeV dark matter (DM) scatters off nuclei it makes them recoil too faintly to be seen by leading detectors. The community addressed this challenge mainly by proposing novel detection technologies: most of them are still in the conception phase, a few became experiments but are not yet testing motivated DM models. However, relativistic fluxes of light DM necessarily reach us on Earth, and open completely new possibilities to search for DM today, in existing experiments. I will review our proposal to observe sub-GeV Dark Matter upscattered by cosmic rays at large neutrino detectors like Super- and Hyper-Kamiokande, DUNE, KamLAND and JUNO. I will then present novel strong constraints and sensitivities, from the same experiments, that rely on the high-energy flux of DM produced in atmospheric showers. These techniques allow to probe genuinely new parameter space, allowed both by theoretical consistency and by other direct detection experiments, cosmology, meson decays and the LHC.
