XENON1T anomaly and its implication for decaying warm dark matter

Abstract

An excess in the electronic recoil data was observed in the XENON1T detector. One of plausible explanations for the excess is absorption of a vector bosonic particle with the mass of 2−3keV. For this, the kinetic mixing κ∼10−15 of the dark photon with the photon is required if the dark photon explains the current DM abundance. We recently proposed a model where the main component DM today is a decaying warm dark matter (WDM) with the life time comparable to the age of the current universe. The WDM decays to a massless fermion and a massive dark photon. This model was originally designed for addressing both the small scale problems which ΛCDM suffers from and the H0 tension. In this letter, we show that the massive dark photon produced by the WDM decay can be identified with the vector boson inducing the anomalous excess in the XENON1T experiment. Depending on a lifetime of the parent decaying WDM, the dark photon could be either the main component or the sub-component of DM population today.