“Effectively” Limiting Light Dark Matter with Loops
Dark matter searches often focus on a single interaction between dark matter and the Standard Model. However, any interaction between the dark sector and any Standard Model particle can lead to many additional loop level interactions with many other Standard Model particles. In this talk, I will show how dark matter which interacts with nuclei automatically gains interactions with electrons, photons, and light mesons. Despite their loop level suppression, these additional effective interactions can lead to new observables and limits for nucleophillic dark matter. In particular, many sub-GeV dark matter models which are difficult to observe or constrain via direct detection experiments are strongly limited by their effective interactions with photons, electrons and mesons.