Hydrogen Portal to Exotic Radioactivity

David McKeen, Maxim Pospelov, Nirmal Raj

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

We show that in a special class of dark sector models, the hydrogen atom can serve as a portal to new physics, through its decay occurring in abundant populations in the Sun and on Earth. The large fluxes of hydrogen decay daughter states can be detected via their decay or scattering. By constructing two models for either detection channel, we show that the recently reported excess in electron recoils at xenon1t could be explained by such signals in large regions of parameter space unconstrained by proton and hydrogen decay limits.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number231803
JournalPhysical review letters
Volume125
Issue number23
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1 2020
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"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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