Search for Dark-Matter–Nucleon Interactions with a Dark Mediator in PandaX-4T
Di Huang, Abdusalam Abdukerim, Zihao Bo, Wei Chen, Xun Chen, Chen Cheng, Zhaokan Cheng, Xiangyi Cui, Yingjie Fan, Deqing Fang, Changbo Fu, Mengting Fu, Li‐Sheng Geng, Karl Giboni, Linhui Gu, Xuyuan Guo, Chencheng Han, K. Han, Changda He, Jinrong He, Yanlin Huang, J. Huang, Zhou Huang, Ruquan Hou, Yu Hou, Xiangdong Ji, Yonglin Ju, Chenxiang Li, Jiafu Li, Mingchuan Li, Shuaijie Li, Tao Li, Q. Lin, Jianglai Liu, Congcong Lu, Xiaoying Lü, Lingyin Luo, Yunyang Luo, Wenbo Ma, Y. G., Yajun Mao, Yue Meng, Xuyang Ning, Ningchun Qi, Zhicheng Qian, Xiangxiang Ren, Nasir Shaheed, Xiaofeng Shang, Xiyuan Shao, Guofang Shen, Lin Si, Wenliang Sun, Andi Tan, Yi Tao, Anqing Wang, Meng Wang, Qiuhong Wang, Shaobo Wang, Siguang Wang, Wei Wang, Xiuli Wang, Zhou Wang, Yuehuan Wei, Mengmeng Wu, Weihao Wu, Jingkai Xia, M. Xiao, Xiang Xiao, Pengwei Xie, Binbin Yan, Xiyu Yan, Jijun Yang, Yong Yang, Yukun Yao, Chunxu Yu, Ying Yuan, Zhe Yuan, Xinning Zeng, Dan Zhang, Minzhen Zhang, Peng Zhang, Shibo Zhang, Shu Zhang, Tao Zhang, Wei Zhang, Yang Zhang, Yingxin Zhang, Yuanyuan Zhang, Li Zhao, Qibin Zheng, Jifang Zhou, Ning Zhou, Xiaopeng Zhou, Yong Zhou, Yubo Zhou, Ran Huo, Hai-Bo Yu
Abstract
We report results of a search for dark-matter--nucleon interactions via a dark mediator using optimized low-energy data from the PandaX-4T liquid xenon experiment. With the ionization-signal-only data and utilizing the Migdal effect, we set the most stringent limits on the cross section for dark matter masses ranging from $30\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{MeV}/{\mathrm{c}}^{2}$ to $2\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}/{\mathrm{c}}^{2}$. Under the assumption that the dark mediator is a dark photon that decays into scalar dark matter pairs in the early Universe, we rule out significant parameter space of such thermal relic dark-matter model.