Indications for an axionlike state in mass range 1-7 keV from XENON

There was a popular article about bump claimed by ZENON group this suggesting the existence of an axion-like state with mass in the range 1-7 keV. Also Jester discusses the evidence for the claimed bump.

Originally XENON searched evidence for WIMPs – weak interacting very massive particles. They would have made themselves visible via scattering from ZENON nuclei. Nothing was found.

Second candidate for dark matter particles are very light axions, which could be produced copiously in Sun. They would not have any detectable effect on heavy XENON atom but they could scatter from electrons and ionize XENON atom. The figure in the posting of Jester summarizes the energy spectrum of the observed ionization events. The figure shows approximately constant backgroud below 30 keV down to 1 keV below which it drops abruptly suggesting threshold. There are also indications for a peak around 1-2 keV. There is 3.5 sigma excess of events in the range 1-7 keV.

The mass of the dark particle candidate is in the range 1-7 keV. TGD allows to imagine several options but for all of them one would have analog of pion as dark matter candidate.

1. TGD predicts scaled copies of hadron physics and electroweak physics. There are indications for the particles of these physics having mass scaled by a power of 2 from that for say ordinary meson. Could the particle be a scaled down pion?

TGD also predicts the possibility of p-adically scaled variants of leptons and quarks with mass scaled down or up by a power of 2. Could the particle be scaled down pion as bound state of scaled down quarks?

This because the binding energy scale of ordinary nuclear physics about 7 MeV would be scaled down by the ratio 2^-10≈ 10^-3 of the p-adic length scales of proton and electron labelled by k=107 and k=127 to a value about 7 keV, which represents the upper end of the range 1-7 keV. There is evidence that X ray emission with energies of this order of magnitude from Sun affects nuclear decay rates at Earth.

The pion-like particles could be indeed dark in TGD sense (ordinary particle but with h_eff=n× h₀>h). Could the axion candidate be scaled down variant of electro-pion with mass 1 MeV with k=127: if the mass of electro-pion scales down like the nuclear binding energy, the scaling k=107 → 127 would take the mass of electro-pion to 1 keV. For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.