Radiation exposure from the dark

Abstract

We explore the possibility that exotic forms of dark matter could expose humans on Earth or on prolonged space travel to a significant radiation dose. The radiation exposure from dark matter interacting with nuclei in the human body is generally assumed to be negligible compared to other sources of background radiation. However, as we discuss here, current data allow for dark matter models where this is not necessarily true. In particular, if dark matter is heavier and more strongly interacting than weakly interacting massive particle dark matter, it could act as ionizing radiation and deposit a significant amount of radiation energy in all or part of the human population, similar to or even exceeding the known radiation exposure from other background sources. Conversely, the non-observation of such an exposure can be used to constrain this type of heavier and more strongly interacting dark matter. We first consider the case where dark matter scatters elastically and identify the relevant parameter space in a model-independent way. We also discuss how previous bounds from cosmological probes, as well as atmospheric and space-based detectors, might be avoided, and how a re-analysis of existing radiation data, along with a simple experiment monitoring ionizing radiation in space with a lower detection threshold, could help constrain part of this parameter space. We finally propose a hypothetical dark matter candidate that scatters inelastically and argue that, in principle, one per mille of the Earth's population could attain a significant radiation dose from such a dark matter exposure in their lifetime.