Escaping Solar Capture: Majoron mediated Elastic Dark Matter for the LZ 248~keV Event
Abstract
We interpret the 248 keVnr nuclear-recoil candidate reported by LZ through elastic dark matter scattering mediated by a light Majoron. The Majoron provides a natural origin for the required pseudoscalar interaction: it is the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson associated with spontaneous lepton number breaking, directly connecting the recoil signal to neutrino mass generation. After a model independent analysis of this idea, we present a concrete realization in a scotogenic ultraviolet completion in which the lightest singlet Majorana fermion is dark matter and acquires both its mass and Majoron coupling from the symmetry breaking dynamics. A vector like up type quark and a type-I Dirac seesaw in quark sector communicate the Majoron interaction to the up quark. At low energies, the resulting portal generates the nonrelativistic operator 𝒪6, whose momentum dependence reproduces the high-recoil event without overpopulating the lower energy bins. Its spin structure removes the dominant heavy element solar capture channels, while capture on hydrogen is suppressed by poor kinematic matching and small momentum transfer. This construction simultaneously reproduces the LZ recoil spectrum and the observed thermal relic abundance while strongly suppressing solar capture.
Related
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- Majoron dark matter detection via hybrid magnon transmon qubit system
- Majoron Dark Matter, High-Scale Seesaw, and Leptogenesis
- Solar Neutrino Signals and Capture-Annihilation Equilibrium of SU(5) Neutralino Dark Matter
- Enhancing Constraints on Ultralight Axion Dark Matter from Gravitational Capture
BibTeX
@misc{chulia2026escaping,
title = {{Escaping Solar Capture: Majoron mediated Elastic Dark Matter for the LZ 248~keV Event}},
author = {Salvador Centelles Chuliá and Ayan Chattaraj and Rahul Srivastava and Surabhi Srivastava},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.32435},
eprint = {2609.32435},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32435},
note = {CC0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Escaping Solar Capture: Majoron mediated Elastic Dark Matter for the LZ 248~keV Event
AU - Salvador Centelles Chuliá
AU - Ayan Chattaraj
AU - Rahul Srivastava
AU - Surabhi Srivastava
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/26
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.32435
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32435
AB - We interpret the 248 keV_nr nuclear-recoil candidate reported by LZ through elastic dark matter scattering mediated by a light Majoron. The Majoron provides a natural origin for the required pseudoscalar interaction: it is the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson associated with spontaneous lepton number breaking, directly connecting the recoil signal to neutrino mass generation. After a model independent analysis of this idea, we present a concrete realization in a scotogenic ultraviolet completion in which the lightest singlet Majorana fermion is dark matter and acquires both its mass and Majoron coupling from the symmetry breaking dynamics. A vector like up type quark and a type-I Dirac seesaw in quark sector communicate the Majoron interaction to the up quark. At low energies, the resulting portal generates the nonrelativistic operator 𝒪_6, whose momentum dependence reproduces the high-recoil event without overpopulating the lower energy bins. Its spin structure removes the dominant heavy element solar capture channels, while capture on hydrogen is suppressed by poor kinematic matching and small momentum transfer. This construction simultaneously reproduces the LZ recoil spectrum and the observed thermal relic abundance while strongly suppressing solar capture.
ER -