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Dark matter candidates comprising several substates separated by a small mass gap, and coupled to the standard model by (sub-) GeV force carriers, can exhibit nontrivial scattering interactions in direct-detection experiments. We analyze the secluded U (1) ₒ-mediated weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) scenario, and calculate the elastic and inelastic cross sections for multicomponent WIMP scattering off nuclei. We find that second-order elastic scattering, mediated by virtual excited states, provides strong sensitivity to the parameters of the model for a wide range of mass splittings, while for small the WIMP excited states have lifetimes exceeding the age of the Universe, and generically have a fractional relative abundance above 0. 1%. This generates even stronger constraints for 200 keV due to exothermic deexcitation events in detectors.
Batell et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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