Josephine Swann

Abstract:

As Earth swings around the Universe, it could gravitationally collect and bind low energy dark matter. This dark matter could interact with itself to produce theorized “dark photons” that could kinetically mix with the standard model of particle physics and produce detectable results. These results could be any number of particles but we choose to focus on muons since detectors today are most sensitive to muons. However, galactic neutrino interactions in Earth’s crust could also produce the same signal in detectors, so a background calculation needs to be done to determine the number of muons expected at a detector like CMS or IceCube to differentiate background from noise. Using a parameterized approach, we estimate a near-zero background from galactic neutrino crust interactions.