New spectral features from bound dark matter

Journal article, 2016

We demonstrate that dark matter particles gravitationally bound to the Earth can induce a characteristic nuclear recoil signal at low energies in direct detection experiments. The new spectral feature that we predict can provide a complementary verification of dark matter discovery at experiments with positive signal but unclear background. The effect is generically expected, in that the ratio of bound over halo dark matter event rates at detectors is independent of the dark matter-nucleon cross section.