Kavli Affiliate: Peter W. Graham
| First 5 Authors: Asher Berlin, Asher Berlin, , ,
| Summary:
A terrestrial population of millicharged particles that interact
significantly with normal matter can arise if they make up a dark matter
subcomponent or if they are light enough to be produced in cosmic ray air
showers. Such particles thermalize to terrestrial temperatures through repeated
scatters with normal matter in Earth’s environment. We show that a simple
electrified shell (e.g., a Van de Graaff generator) functions as an efficient
accumulator of such room-temperature millicharged particles, parametrically
enhancing their local density by as much as twelve orders of magnitude. This
can be used to boost the sensitivity of any detector housed in the shell’s
interior, such as ion traps and tests of Coulomb’s law. In a companion paper,
we apply this specifically to Cavendish tests of Coulomb’s law, and show that a
well-established setup can probe a large region of unexplored parameter space,
with sensitivity to the irreducible density of millicharged particles generated
from cosmic rays that outperforms future accelerator searches for sub-GeV
masses.
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