Skip to content
DraconiticResearch
Search Sources API
197,768 studies31 sourcesUpdated 35 min ago
Peer-reviewedCC BYPhysical review. D/Physical review. D.

Direct detection of solar chameleons with electron recoil data from XENONnT

  • Guan-Wen Yuan1,2
  • Anne-Christine Davis3
  • Maurizio Giannotti4,5
  • Sunny Vagnozzi1,2
  • Luca Visinelli6,7
  • Julia K. Vogel8
8 affiliations
  1. 1Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications (TIFPA)-INFN
  2. 2University of Trento
  3. 3University of Cambridge
  4. 4Centro de Astropartículas y Física de Altas Energías
  5. 5Universidad de Zaragoza
  6. 6INFN Sezione di Napoli, Gruppo Collegato di Salerno
  7. 7University of Salerno
  8. 8Technische Universität Dortmund
Open at sourceDOICite

Abstract

We reassess prospects for direct detection of solar chameleons, in light of recent progress in modeling their production, and the availability of new XENONnT data. We show that the contribution from Primakoff production in the electric fields of electrons and ions dominates the electron recoil event rate, which is enhanced compared to earlier estimates based on magnetic conversion in the tachocline alone. We argue that the signal is governed by the effective coupling β eff ≡ β γ M e − 4 , which encodes the combined effects of production and detection, where β γ and M e are the chameleon-photon (conformal) coupling and chameleon-electron disformal coupling scale, respectively. Setting the height of the chameleon potential to the dark energy (DE) scale Λ ≃ 2.4 meV , we show that XENONnT electron recoil data set the upper limit log 10 β eff < − 6.9 . This limit is independent of the conformal matter coupling β m and index n , and applies to the whole class of inverse power-law chameleons, well beyond the n = 1 case usually studied. We comment on how future multitarget experiments and lower-threshold analyses could distinguish solar chameleons from other light (pseudo)scalar particles such as axions. Our work demonstrates that existing dark matter direct detection experiments can probe regions of parameter space relevant to screened DE models, providing complementary tests to astrophysical and fifth-force searches at no additional experimental cost.

Related

  1. Direct detection of right-handed fermionic dark matter: electron-recoil measurements in Xe atoms
    Santiago Collazo, Carlos Argüelles, Soroush Shakeri +1
    arXivPreprintCC BY 4.0Full textCosmologyHigh-energy & particle physicsarXiv
  2. Probing Solar Chameleons with XENONnT Ionization-Only Data
    Guan-Wen Yuan
    arXivPreprintarXiv licenceFull textHigh-energy astrophysicsSolar & stellar physicsarXiv
  3. Recoil-enhanced temporal electron compression
    Tomáš Brada, Cruz I. Velasco, F. Javier García de Abajo
    Physical Review ResearchPeer-reviewedPublisher termsAtomic, molecular & optical physicsCrossref
  4. Nuclear recoil with electron vacuum polarization in muonic atoms
    Vojtěch Patkóš, Mateusz Pańtak, Krzysztof Pachucki
    arXivPreprintCC BY 4.0Full textAtomic, molecular & optical physicsarXiv
  5. The Electron-Recoil Response Tail and the LZ High-Energy Event Background
    Triparno Bandyopadhyay, Rajarajeswari Ramasamy, Nishitha TP
    arXivPreprintarXiv licenceFull textHigh-energy & particle physicsarXiv

Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{yuan2026direct,
  title = {{Direct detection of solar chameleons with electron recoil data from XENONnT}},
  author = {Guan-Wen Yuan and Anne-Christine Davis and Maurizio Giannotti and Sunny Vagnozzi and Luca Visinelli and Julia K. Vogel},
  journal = {Physical review. D/Physical review. D.},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  doi = {10.1103/8mpf-5s3k},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1103/8mpf-5s3k},
  note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - Direct detection of solar chameleons with electron recoil data from XENONnT
AU  - Guan-Wen Yuan
AU  - Anne-Christine Davis
AU  - Maurizio Giannotti
AU  - Sunny Vagnozzi
AU  - Luca Visinelli
AU  - Julia K. Vogel
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/22
JO  - Physical review. D/Physical review. D.
DO  - 10.1103/8mpf-5s3k
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1103/8mpf-5s3k
AB  - We reassess prospects for direct detection of solar chameleons, in light of recent progress in modeling their production, and the availability of new XENONnT data. We show that the contribution from Primakoff production in the electric fields of electrons and ions dominates the electron recoil event rate, which is enhanced compared to earlier estimates based on magnetic conversion in the tachocline alone. We argue that the signal is governed by the effective coupling β eff ≡ β γ M e − 4 , which encodes the combined effects of production and detection, where β γ and M e are the chameleon-photon (conformal) coupling and chameleon-electron disformal coupling scale, respectively. Setting the height of the chameleon potential to the dark energy (DE) scale Λ ≃ 2.4 meV , we show that XENONnT electron recoil data set the upper limit log 10 β eff < − 6.9 . This limit is independent of the conformal matter coupling β m and index n , and applies to the whole class of inverse power-law chameleons, well beyond the n = 1 case usually studied. We comment on how future multitarget experiments and lower-threshold analyses could distinguish solar chameleons from other light (pseudo)scalar particles such as axions. Our work demonstrates that existing dark matter direct detection experiments can probe regions of parameter space relevant to screened DE models, providing complementary tests to astrophysical and fifth-force searches at no additional experimental cost.
SN  - 2470-0010
SN  - 2470-0029
SN  - 2470-0037
ER  -