Dark matter candidates comprising several substates separated by a small mass gap Δm, 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)S-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 Δm 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 Δm200 keV due to exothermic deexcitation events in detectors.
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Batell et al. (2009) studied this question.
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