Deeply Inelastic Dark Matter: Beam Dumps as Wimp Cannons

We consider a phenomenological approach to constraining dark matter interactions with quarks by the exchange of a light mediator particle. We find that, for low WIMP masses, an old beam dump experiment provides stronger bounds than currently obtainable at the LHC with monojet searches. 1 A toy model for light dark matter The search for particle dark matter (DM) benefits from many and diverse approaches, both theoretically and experimentally. Recently, there has been much theoretical interest in scenarios for light, “secluded” DM 1), where the DM – generally a hypothesized Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) – interacts with the SM only by the exchange of a mediator particle. There are several viable portals for such an interaction. For example, the WIMP