Boosted Dark Matter Directionality in Large Liquid Scintillator Detectors

@misc{tse2026boosted,
  title = {{Boosted Dark Matter Directionality in Large Liquid Scintillator Detectors}},
  author = {Samuel S. H. Tse and Qishan Liu and Kenny C. Y. Ng and Koun Choi and Yu-Feng Li},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.31666},
  eprint = {2610.31666},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31666},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Boosted Dark Matter Directionality in Large Liquid Scintillator Detectors
AU  - Samuel S. H. Tse
AU  - Qishan Liu
AU  - Kenny C. Y. Ng
AU  - Koun Choi
AU  - Yu-Feng Li
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/27
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.31666
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31666
AB  - Light dark matter can be boosted by cosmic-ray-dark matter interactions, which opens the possibility of direct-detection searches with large neutrino detectors. We consider the signal produced by boosted dark matter undergoing quasi-elastic scattering off carbon and knocking out a neutron in a large liquid scintillator detector. A distinctive delayed gamma ray from neutron capture can be reconstructed after ∼ 210 μs, which is paired up with the prompt signal during neutron propagation. We find that 100 kt·yr of data from the neutron-coincidence channel will be able to probe new parameter space compared to free proton signals found in previous work. We further consider the possibility of utilizing directional information from the displaced vertex associated with the capture of the final-state neutron. However, we find that directional information does not materially improve the sensitivity due to the large nucleon scattering angle.
ER  -